Yes, it sure is. If the data is corrupted, then there's no way to put the pieces back together even if the drive is repairable. I ran into this with a friend's hard disk. He had many of those file fragments in a folder and nothing was recoverable even with disk utilities.
You can try, but I doubt you'll have any luck. Most of those tools are also pretty expensive. I had one where I worked and only once was I able to recover data and that wasn't even totally successful even after many hours scanning the drive.
