I noticed a clicking sound coming from my laptop about a month ago and figured something was wrong since I had been having occasional system freezes. I figured there was something going on with my hdd, since the windows logs gave me large amounts of the same HDD error:
"The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period."
So I ran a sectors test and after around 400GB checked it ran into bad sectors, and from there on it took too long to check anything more(another note, I record gameplay and whenever I got to filling the drive past 400GB then video FPS dropped to 1). I started backing up files but as I was doing that the laptop froze again and I had to force a shutdown. The laptop didn't boot up after that. The weird part is that it wasn't even my windows drive. I took the drive out and the laptop was working fine again. Tried connecting it to a desktop with XP installed, but the PC behaved exactly the same way, didn't boot up.

Anybody got an idea how to salvage the data that was before that 400GB? I think it's all still completely fine, I just can't access the drive.

You need to clone data on another drive, with tools like DMDE (dos version and free) or Prosoft Mediatools (dos and pay).
I prefer Mediatools, you need to do a bootable cd for Mediatools.
If you are lucky, you will be able to clone all sectors, but if there are too much damaged sectors / head issue, you will not be able to clone all sectors.

Do not try to load the drive in windows, and do not try recovery files tools as Recuva because you will do thing worse.
Goo luck

@Nemeziz,

Your choices depend on many things you haven't yet mentioned, including:
- how important the data is to you;
- your budget;
- your attitude to risk (remember that you could make the situation worse, or even make it totally unrecoverable, depending on what you do);
- how quickly you need to recover the data;
etc...

It doesn't really matter how long it takes, I don't want to use any money to do it, I wouldn't cry over it much if I lost the data on it, but would be nice to get it back.

OK, based on that answer, then trying to clone the drive first (as already suggested), using a suitable utility which is designed for use on failing drives, would be the best you can do with zero budget and if the data is not really important. You might lose everything permanently by trying this, but since the data isn't important, then you can choose to take that risk if you want to. Then move to the next step of trying to do a logical recovery from the clone.

Various utilities for cloning in this situation have been discussed many, many times on this forum, along with some reasons to choose one utility instead of another (e.g. depending on your skills). Use the forum search facility to read the previous discussions.

If you want to do it all free, get DMDE dos version
http://softdm.com/download/dmde244.zip

You need to create before a bootable usb stick:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Har ... Tool.shtml

All data on the usb will be lost, so backup those before...

Then you need an empty drive with same capacity of the faulty one (or bigger).
All data will be overwritten into the backup drive.

I prefer Mediatools because it's easier to use and simple to create a bootable cd (just one clic)
http://www.downloadsource.net/1755288/M ... fessional/

My last message was deleted by some moderator, why?

I will have to borrow a 500GB drive from somebody. Thanks for the quick answers!

You welcome