I have used CnW recovery to recover from a corrupt root directory caused by moving an active disk drive. The only option Windows offered was to re-format. I bought a 30 day license for $20US. As "luck" would have it all files were in sub-directories and I recovered everything using the automatic procedure. The software finds directories on the disk.
Make very sure that you are not writing to the damaged media. The ideal is that you image the corrupt disk and work with the image. As I recall the $20 version of the CnW software does not allow this. It creates images but does allow them to be read. That costs more.
You can try out the software for free, it lists the files it has found but will not actually recover them. You cannot of course be sure that the "recovered" files are good until you try to use them. At least if it can't find anything you don't have to pay.