[kluster]

i have a 500gb hard drive that lost a partition(displays it as raw), the second partition works well with no problems, it is just the main partition that went bad. it has very important information that i would like to recover from it. i ran testdisk and it says the mbr is bad. how can i recover it. i ran active partition recovery on it and it displays the root file structure but when i try to open it, it just hangs. i believe it has bad sectors. is there a way to bypass them and salvage data off it? thanks!

This post has been edited by kluster: 29 September 2012 - 08:39 PM

[jaclaz]

kluster, on 29 September 2012 - 08:34 PM, said:

i have a 500gb hard drive that lost a partition(displays it as raw), the second partition works well with no problems, it is just the main partition that went bad. it has very important information that i would like to recover from it. i ran testdisk and it says the mbr is bad. how can i recover it. i ran active partition recovery on it and it displays the root file structure but when i try to open it, it just hangs. i believe it has bad sectors. is there a way to bypass them and salvage data off it? thanks!

Yes/No.
Meaning that once fixed the filesystem, any bad sector will remain "bad", i.e. data saved on those bad sectors is normally NOT recoverable.

"I ran TESTDISK", no offence intended , is like saying "I used a tool".

Try running it with a LOG file AND post the LOG and describe EXACTLY (with the more possible details) HOW you have run it and WHAT it gave as feedback.

The usual general advice, EXPECIALLY if you suspect bad sectors is to image the drive BEFORE attempting any repair, a tool like datarescuedd:
http://www.datarescu...cue/v3/drdd.htm
may be able to manage to read data from some "hard to read" bad sectors (of course not from a "really bad" sector) and you would have a "way back should you for any reason make a mistake during the recovery procedure.
Besides, it is very possible - it greatly depends on WHY/HOW the corruption occurred - that after the MBR/partition table has been fixed/restored, the actual filesystem needs to be fixed (CHKDSK /R) and this is a "no-way-back" kind of operation, if it works, good, but if for any reason it fails it may make the situation acyually worse.

How big is the failed partition?
Do you have another disk drive of suitable size?

jaclaz