Recovering a Mac hfs+ partitioned drive

Please help :( I just need to recover a fucked up drive: a mac HFS+ partionated drive.
I googled and found techtool pro and some other stuff.
I don't know if it's reliable at all, it seems this techtool is advertised even on the apple site.
Please guys have you got some experience with recovering tools? is it possible to fix a drive if disk utility failed?
Recovering just the files is a good option as well, but on windows always failed when happend to me, don't know on mac.

cheers