I am dealing with a Samsung 3.5" drive here.

MHDD shows a few bad sectors but nothing really bad.

Data can be pulled off it easily. BUT, the bad sectors seem to be
at the boot sector of the drive. Drive gets stuck at Windows 7 logon with
message "Please Wait".

But there programs on the PC that owner wants to use for just one more time before
a new HDD is setup.

I have the tried the Scan and Remap features of MHDD but the drive is still the same.

Any ideas how to get this drive bootable for just one more time? All ideas welcome...

I am working off the clone.

Attempted repairs with Win Install disk just cause system to BSOD.

My suspicion is that the install disk is trying to install new boot sector files to
the bad sector area also - thus causing BSOD.

Anybody got any ideas on this one?

If your clone drive is physically healthy, there is no reason why a windows repair/upgrade install wouldn't work, to the best of my knowledge. I certainly don't recommend remapping sectors on the original, if your goal is to recover the data stored within the sector. If you want the data within those sectors, you may need to get a better clone tool on the job, like DDI or PC3K+DE.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

What are the programs that the guy wants to run?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

If you are working off the clone, repairing with Win install disk, it shouldn't have problems "installing new boot sector files to the bad sector area" as there are no bad sectors in the clone.

How did you clone the drive? Software/hardware?
And bad sectors ?

okay, finally solved this problem.

There was a tiny hairline scratch on the Windows DVD - this was preventing the boot sector of the cloned
drive to be repaired properly.

Used another DVD - repair was successful.

Thank you to everyone who responded.