Is there any good software to recover a corrupted hard drive?

I have an E Drive on my machine where I had a bunch of less regularly accessed files parked. Suddenly, then I try to access it, I get a message “E:\ is not accessible. The file of directory is corrupted and unreadable. It’s an 80 gig NTFS drive and running under XP, SP3. Is it worth downloading a tool to try to rebuild or recover data on it? It definitely doesn’t have anything on it that would be worth the cost per megabyte that the data recovery firms charge for their services.