Corrupt/Unallocated ' C ' drive - Need help with fixing the HD or recovering data

[bearhuglov]

Hello Folks,

My 1 TB Seagate 3.5" Hard Drive with Windows 7 64 Bit OS would not boot a few days ago. I tried to access the drive using Gparted & Linux Mint. The physical condition of the drive appears to be fine = meaning = it spins as it should with no clicks or heart attacks. It has ' C ' (250GB) and ' D ' (700GB) partitions. ' D ' drive is full of data (docs, photos, music etc) which I have no problem accessing, copying & moving. In fact, I have already copied all that data to other media.

Now my issue is the ' C ' drive. I still do have some very important data sitting in what would have been 'My Documents' folder under ' C ' that I would like to extract. The Hard Drive is UNTOUCHED. I have not over written, formatted or jump started the drive. But I have indeed tried to 'read' the drive by connecting it to another desktop as a secondary drive, by using a variety of software.

Here are the ones I used....

Photorec
Qphotorec
Minitool Partition Wizard
Active File Recovery
Active Partition Recovery

Photorec, Qphotorec, Active File Recovery have run for days, but retrieved ' 0 ' data. I was not able to recover the partition either through the aforementioned other software. I have not run any Windows Disc utilities (such as 'repair your computer' option) fearing it might alter the drive parameters forever rendering it useless.

I have run out of ideas. Can any of you smart folks give me suggestions as to how I can 'recover' the drive? Any windows or Linux software tools you can recommend? I have attached images of the drives as they show up. The partition in question is the ' L ' drive in the picture. The other picture is the scan I ran through 'active file recovery' software. Thank you very much.

[bearhuglov]

Sorry, the partition in question is the " K " drive (not ' L ' drive) in the above image. Sorry for the mix up.

[Midknyte]

There are a LOT of bad sectors on the drive. It is NOT fine.

If you used Photorec, did you try Testdisk? However at this point, the damage is probably too severe.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

[bearhuglov]

Yes, I forgot to mention. I have run Testdisk as well. I ran most of them as part of a Linux distro. Yes, the interface shows a lot of bad sector, but can this be trusted? With the way how these software are being constructed/written, I am skeptical & would not want to believe everything I am seeing to be true. :- ) Does Ultimate Boot CD have any interesting tools I could use? How about the typical Windows Repair tool? Anyone?

[Midknyte]

You can run the Seatools diags from UBCD5. I'm pretty sure it's going to confirm what we already know; bad sectors. If you have bad sectors, you should replace the drive.
I'm guessing you mounted the drive on a Windows system. If so, you can run the Windows version of Seatools.
You already ran Testdisk and Photorec (both are on UBCD5).

I don't think Windows Repair would help, since it can't even see the partition.

It's not free, but GetDataBack is another one you could try.
http://www.runtime.org/

Unfortunately, I can't guarantee even that would work. That's why it is so important to have backups; recovery is much more difficult.

[bearhuglov]

+ Midknyte + Thank you very, very much for all your inputs & suggestions. I suppose I will use seatools & UBCD & a few more Linux tools to see what they can offer me. Some people (and that includes myself) never learn. LOL But hey, I have been backing up all my stuff on a weekly basis. It so happens that I lost the partition just when I dumped more data on C than usual. But I am going to keep the drive intact & will continue to do my circus. Yes, it is pretty much a dead horse at this point, but if some miracle happens, no one would be happier than I to come back & share what I did.