mhdd - sector image files - can i extract files from them

[sirius]

Trying to recover data from 500G western SATA digital drive.
No funny noises. Drive detected by bios but freezes windows.
Drive seems to be fully operational with mhdd.
I have created 160G bootable hd with mhdd.exe.
Saving sector file with ATOF from problem drive to my bootable drive.

I cannot work out if I will be able to use the image file and exctract data from them.
Not sure what to do next.
Do I write them back to a working drive and then use a drive scanning tool to idenfity and recover files
or am i wasting my time.

[pepe]

U probably cannot image a 500G drive to a 160G.
There is some command im MHDD like 'deactivate MBR' or something like that (this is to prevent win from messing with patitions).
Do that, then u can use some windows based imaging soft, as windows won't hang (probably). And use a bigger drive
After this u can use a logical recovery soft on the image.

pepe

[sirius]

I tried clrmbr but got failure message.