My friend's HDD suddenly lost its partioning system?

Here's the condensed story of his HDD problem.

HDD:

- Maxtor
- 160GB
- 8MB Cache
- 7200RPMs
- Partitioned at maximum disk capacity
- Drive is ~2months old (Got it in August)
- Defragged 2 - 3 times in total
- Didn't make any clicking sounds prior to the lost partition

So he's working on the computer with very little programs open. He reboots and tries to access the drive and it asks him to format.

At this point, he reboots to check if the hard drive is detected upon startup after the ram checking and all of that. Yes, it detects fine.

He then goes to download the Maxtor diagnostic program and no, there's no bad sectors or anything.

So, is there any data recovering program he can use that is half decent? He has 128gigs of stuff stored on it that are crucial to him. Certain files, his art work over the years or perhaps, any other type of way of recovering his files?

Thanks.

He