Originally Posted by
mbreuer
As the disk itself is presumably undamaged, it should be recoverable via the disk tools, no? Before spending money on a service, how about trying out your local apple store? They should be able to connect the drive to a working machine and see if the drive can be recovered (i.e., b-trees fixed). The disk tools disk (which you can also boot into) attempts to recover files via alternate paths and recreate the btree if need be.
i don't know if the apple store will run recovery tools, but that could be an option if they do. the problem is you don't want to make things worse, and that's not that hard to do if someone uses the wrong tool or makes a mistake and writes to the drive. as for apple's disk utility, it can sometimes repair a drive, but it is not anywhere near as comprehensive as disk warrior.