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copied!<p>From a "I need to get my data back" perspective, if your data is really valuable to you, I would recommend sending the drive to a data recovery specialist. Depending on how valuable the data is, the cost (probably several hundred dollars) is trivial. Ideally, you would find a data recovery specialist that doesn't just run some software to do the recovery - if the software approach doesn't work, they should be able to do things like replace the circiut board on the drive, and probably other things (I am not a data recover specialist).</p> <p>If the value of the data on the drive doesn't quite rise to that level, you should consider purchasing one of the many pieces of software for data recovery. For example, I personally have used and would recommend GetDataBack from Runtime software <a href="http://www.runtime.org" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.runtime.org</a>. I've used it to recover a failing drive, it worked for me.</p> <p>And now on to more general information... The standard process for data recovery off of a failing drive is to do as little as possible on the drive itself. You should unplug the drive, and stop attempting to do anything. The drive is failing, and it is likely to get worse and worse. You don't want to play around with it. You need to maximize your chances of getting the data off.</p> <p>The way the process works is to use software that reads the drive block-by-block (not file-by-file), and makes an image copy of the drive. The software attempts to read every block, and will retry the reads if they fail, and writes an image file which is an image of the entire hard drive.</p> <p>Once the hard drive has been imaged, the software then works against the image to identify the various logical parts of the drive - the partitions, directories, and files. And then it enables you to copy the files off of the image.</p> <p>The software can typically "deduce" structures from the image. For example, if the partition table is damaged or missing, the software will scan through the entire image, looking for things that might be partitions, and if they look enough like partitions, it will treat them like a partition and see if it can find directories and files. So good software is written with using a lot of knowledge about the different structures on the drive.</p> <p>If you want to learn how to write such software, good for you! My recommendation is that you start with books about how various operating systems organize data on hard drives, so that you can start to get an intuitive feel for how a software might work with drive images to pull data from them.</p>

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