How to recover deleted files from OS 10.5.8? I'm not very experienced with Macs, so please pardon my mistakes. I'm assisting a coworker with a client of ours who recently let go of one of their employees, and in the resulting meeting the person deleted all their documents &amp; threw the laptop onto the floor, cracking the screen and likely damaging the hard drive.

The Mac appears to boot normally, and boots into a profile like normal, but we have no documents of any kind to access. My worker tried MacKeeper, but after running for over a day it crashed. Edit: MacKeeper disappeared because my coworker uninstalled it &amp; deleted it, so I removed this part of the paragraph.

In any case, for Mac OS all I'm seeing for data recovery is paid software. I was hoping to be able to inspect the file system and/or attempt recovery in Parted Magic, or run TestDisk/PhotoRec on it, but I cannot boot to Hiren's on this computer (which doesn't surprise me). Is there a Mac equivalent to Hiren's I could look into?
There should be a way of recovering the data if the profile/system can load successfully. I use Data Rescue 3 (tried but NOT affiliated with the company/developer) which recovers files directly from the hard drive and is actually quite good.

I believe Data Rescue 3 (link here) has a free trial and also a paid version, although it is quite expensive.

Can you access system files or any documents you have created at all?