Data recovery from HDD

[cork]

I have a friends 40 Gig Western Digital Hard drive that is in my computer as a slave drive. They could not boot it up, and when viewed on "my computer", it shows as 2 drives of 20 Gig each. One of the logical drives has data that can be read, the other shows no content. I ran the "PC Inspector File Recovery" program and could not read any of the information on the blank partition either. At one time, this drive was working fine under Windows XP, so apparently, the blank partition is the one with Windows on it.
I downloaded and ran the Western Digital diagnostics software on the drive and it said that there were bad sectors in the drive and wanted to know if I wanted those sectors to be repaired. As it was checking the drive, it only seemed to wait for a few minutes on one sector, which would lead me to believe there was only a couple or more bad sectors.
My question is, knowing that repairing the sector overwrites the data in that sector, what are my chances of recovering any data after the repair? Is there perhaps a better way of recovering this data that I'm not aware of?
Thanks in advance for any info.

[flanzig1]

You may be able to recover individual files after a repair but windows would probably be corrupted. Best bet is to get everything off the good partion and have them get a new hard drive.

[cork]

Yes, my hopes are to recover some of the graphics files that are pictures from a vacation, maybe a spreadsheet or two, things like that. I will be getting a new hard drive afterwards for sure. Thanks

[glc]

Your best shot at recovering data in this case is Spinrite - use Level 2.

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

[cork]

Thanks, I just went to their site and I'll give it a try.

[cork]

Last night I tried the Level 2 on the drive, and it still doesn't show the first partition as an accessible drive. I'm going to try the Level 4 on it tonight.

[glc]

Level 4 will probably take a couple days to run. If that doesn't do it, all I can think of is try some really heavy duty recovery software (not cheap) such as Ontrack Easy Recovery, you may have to use raw file recovery if the partition is totally gone.

[cork]

Yes, I ran it last night on just the bad partition and shut it down this morning. Thankfully it's got the function to continue at the place where it is stopped.
When I ran Level 2 it found bad sectors and fixed all it could, which were most. So far at Level 4, it has past the spot where the problems were before and has discovered no problems. And it's at 84% done. When I run the File Recovery Software it does show a "Root" directory folder, along with "Deleted" folder and 1 or 2 others, but they are all empty. Would putting the disk in a windows machine and running CHKDSK f: /r possibly help?
Thanks for the input.

[glc]

No, Spinrite is far better at getting data out of bad sectors and then locking them out than anything else you are going to find. Try the Ontrack free trial - if it can find what you need, then you can decide whether to buy it or not.

[cork]

I just downloaded that too. I'll finish up the Level 4 scan and see if It's gotten anything, then I'll try the OnTrack. Thanks again for the help.

[cork]

Sorry for the delay in getting back with you.
Level 4 found no errors on the drive. I downloaded OnTracks trial software and tried it. My computer would freeze up every time I tried to start the program, even though It seems to have installed just fine.
At this point I ran the WD HDD test software, then hooked the drive to my desktop and ran the CHKDSK x: /r on it and it brought the majority of files I needed back to where I could copy them. The Windows directory was gone, but I won't be using this drive anymore anyway. My AVG antivirus found about 6 Trojan viruses also.
I know the SpinRite went in and found and repaired some errors, I guess I need to read up a little on the instructions and see if I missed something on reading the disk after repair. Thanks for your help, my friend was very pleased to have thier vacation pictures back and will start a regular back-up regiment. Thanks again...cork