1 hard drive probleam makes another...help?

[Magnus Hydra]

Hey guys, So this guy beings me a laptop to fix. I find out right away the hard drive is bad. One of the "master files" are bad and the recover cd would fix it but would still end up being messed up. So he hard drive has some hard ware problem. Well the guy has 4 years of work on it he has to have. So I connect it to my pc by usb enclosure. I could see all the data so I figured Installed Norton ghost clone the drive and restore it to another hard drive and use a recover cd to fix the files. Well I kinda dropped the drive and windows could see it anymore:newsmile089:... So I load up ubuntu (which I never use) and see if it can see the hard drive and it could. So I had mojo help my clone the drive...The power went out and only copyed 51gbs. Mojo was a sleep so I tried to redo everything my self. I did:

sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdb1 clone.bin
tryed to put in a folder but couldn't figure out how. So said what ever and hit enter anyways and I look on the drive to see if it made the file and it never showed up. So I stop it from copying. It copy over 54mb of date it said. Well then my hard drive would show up any more... windows asks me to reformat.... I need to fix my drive to get all my data back. I looked on he drive with a hex editor and there is still data on the drive but I guess the first 54mb of data was over written.. I've tried TestDisk but that doesn't seem to be helping me. Any info would be great

[Ryudo]

So wait, let me get this straight...

It was already failing.
You then dropped the drive, causing even further damage. (This is probably the worst you could have done).
You had a power outage while it was in the process of copying data. (Yet another horribly timed incident to cause possible further damage, since it was already a failing HDD).
You stopped another copy process while it was busy.


I'm sorry, but I don't think there's much you can do about your data anymore. At this point it has to have gotten so corrupt that it's basically useless data that remains.
Even if thanks to a miracle, you can still access the drive at this point at all, I don't think even the best recovery software would help you at this point. :/

[pureIso]

Use spinRite, it should fix the drive but this could take up to 15 hours depending on the size.

[feudalnate]

The first sectors of the partition are the most important. Those sectors hold vital information about the partition and are necessary for the partition to be recognized/properly parsed by any sort of software (BIOS, OS, etc.). They also hold tables for mapped data sectors and file tables for information about that mapped data. Overwriting those sectors basically fucked the partition forever and any chance of properly recovering the data that resided on it, although; there may be apps that can recover files by looking for header information or by finding the now unmapped remaining file tables floating around but if the chain maps are gone then you won't be recovering the data as it once was.

The drive itself can be salvaged by just formatting but getting the data you want from it may not be so simple, if possible at all.

P.S: look who it is ;P