Best recovery application for external drives?

I have a Western Digital 500GB external drive I picked up maybe 4 or 5 years ago that I wasn't really using much, but had been the last couple weeks.  Transfered some things over to it on Sunday.   Noticed last night that it wasn't showing up on the desktop.  Went to Disc Utilities and noticed that while the drive itself was accessable, the specific drive was greyed out.   Tried to mount it manually, and no go.
Doing a disk utility repair of the drive on my current computer (iMac Core i7, running Lion) tells me there is no problem.  Doing a disk utility repair of the specified drive tells me there is a partition being updated... but nothing ever updates.
So I unplugged it and hooked up my old iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo, running Panther) and tried to repair it that way.  Now it tells me that the drive has an invalid header volume on that computer, and claims it has repaired the hard drive... but yet, again nothing.
From every indication, the drive itself has all my stuff... I just can't get to it.  And I know there are a handful of products that can scan the drive and help me retrieve the files.   Does anyone have any suggestions?  Any of the ones from the App Store, perhaps?
Thanks.

General File Recovery
If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro.  Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive.  Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk.  Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads.
The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.

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