Hi, guys!

My apologies for coming with such old issues but after reading around and trying a few tricks, I made a bad mistake and now I'm completely at a loss. If anyone here is kind enough to offer a few pointers - be it in a PM if they want to protect their knowledge - I would be extremely grateful.

I'll try to be brief (but I may not succeed): after cleaning a bad virus off of a friend's PC, a week later he called saying computer won't boot anymore. Went over, started it up, it was an extremely slow boot. Powered it off, took it at home and tried to find and fix the issue.
First off I mounted the drive in one of my spare machines and started HDD Regenerator 1.41 in DOS mode as I had done many times before with my own discs. At some point it bailed out, saying something about a SATA controller (none on the board, drive is ATA), so I rebooted and at that point the drive wasn't recognized properly by the BIOS. HDD Regenerator wouldn't detect it anymore, neither would HDAT2.

I went off and bought a new HDD for my friend's machine, installed it, put the OS and everything else, ready to get the files from the old HDD. After finding this place and reading around for hours, I downloaded and ran HDD Repair 2.0. I know, people say it's buggy and whatnot. Thing is, by fortune I managed to bring the drive back to a working state by replacing some of the corrupt modules with ones from an archive found here in the firmware section, from an identical drive.
Upon reboot, the drive was again recognized by the BIOS, MBR, BOOT and TABLE were found upon a HDAT2 scan, I even saw the files and folders in DOS under Volkov Commander with NTFS4DOS, so everything appeared to be just fine. All I had to do was mount the drive in the original machine and copy the files over.

But no, I had to perform one more scan with HDD Regenerator, because one of the bad SA modules had been the G-List and figured there may be true bad sectors on the drive. And indeed they were, about 210 before HDD Reg bailed out again. I rebooted and this time no problems, so ran HDD Reg once more to check the remainder of the drive. It found other bad sectors throught the drive and again it bailed out.

But this time I made a critical mistake: instead of powering off and then back on as stated on the screen, I unplugged the drive's power molex, plugged it back in and restarted HDD Reg. That was stupid, I know now, but you can say it a thousand times - I wouldn't mind. Thing is, right after that a few thousand sectors starting from the first were marked as bad, until I interrupted the scan.

Expectedly, upon reboot the drive was again improperly recognized by BIOS. Tried to restore it again through HDD Repair 2.0 using the same loader as the first time. This time other modules were corrupted, including 0008, which is labeled DISK and 4532 (or similar). I overwrote module 0008 with the one from the archive unaware that the serial number was in there and it obviously way different. Dunno if it matters though, but later on I changed it to the original serial number as found on the drive's sticker. I also tried to restore 4532, which is all zeroes in the archived copy.

Thing is, the 4532 module only apparently gets repaired, because on subsequent checks it keeps throwing an error. Therefore I suspect the respective sector (module is one sector long) is damaged on the drive. Reboot will keep showing the drive as badly recognized in BIOS, HDAT2 reports 'firmware corrupted' and 'DCO frozen' so it can't repair or unmark sectors previously marked as bad by HDD Reg (although I overwrote the G-List again with the empty one from the archive). I suspect a relocation but I have no idea how to check (and restore).

So basically the problem appears to be: firmware is corrupted by possible/apparent bad sectors and access to repairing is locked through DCO or whatever. Seems like a deadlock but I really wish theire is still hope. I really need to get as much data back from the drive as possible, because there's family photos in there and others of sentimental value. And just in case you'd be inclined to refer me to professional data recovery services or say "it's toast, nothing can be done", please don't, because I cannot afford the former and cannot accept the latter.

If anyone has the good heart to offer a few valuable hints, please do speak up. I'm really at wit's end and my friend is eagerly waiting for good news from me, while I'm overwhelmed with shame for my sheer stupidity. Thank you and apologies for not being as brief as I wanted to.

Tip: HDD Regenerator and other similar programs are not for data recovery. PERIOD! They are intended for hard drive refurbishing, and are data destructive. They should never, under any circumstances, be run on a drive until after the data has been recovered onto another device (this is even spelled out in their software terms of use).

Firmware corruption is unlikely the issue now, it's almost certainly bad heads from repeatedly hitting bad sectors (how that software functions).

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

So you're saying other modules in the SA have been repaired succesfully and the one 4532 hasn't because of bad heads? I find that highly unlikely.
Admittedly I know almost nothing about the internal structure of the drive - firmware and all - because I never had stumbled into such issues until now. But I figure if other modules got fixed, why wouldn't a particular one? Unless it includes one or more physically bad sectors. In that case, what I'd like to know is how to relocate a bad sector in the SA so that the respective module could be rewritten succesfully. I believe (and dearly hope) this would be the only thing to do in order to get the drive back to a usable state (correctly recognized by the BIOS) so that I could attempt to rescue whatever can be retrieved from that drive. I should mention the drive has two partitions and they're both NTFS, unfortunately.

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

OK, obviously you're not getting it. HDD Regenerator does not fix firmware, or anything else for that matter. All it does is repeatedly force the drive to hit bad sectors until it either forces the drive to remap the bad sector (losing its data in the process) which is a feature already built into the drive, or it kills the drive completely (which is what usually happens).

Sorry but the program is useless, and has likely quadrupled the cost of recovery now. If not made it impossible entirely.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

I just noticed you mentioned that you overwrote the glist.

I'm surprised they would put such a feature in a program used by so many amateurs.

You really need to get it to a pro and stop messing around. You're just making things a whole lot worse.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

I fixed the firmware using HDD Repair 2.0, not with HDD Regenerator.
First time it all went great. But since I had seen a very slow boot before taking it out for fixing, I figured the drive may have developed bad sectors (maybe the guy kicked the computer while in use, dunno) so I wanted to scan and fix any possible bad sectors before retrieving the data.
My mistake was to pull and reconnect the drive power instead of a full shutdown.
Subsequently, for a reason I don't yet know since I don't know the internals of HDD Reg, on next run it started counting bad sectors from the very beginning, probably attempting to remap them or whatever it does. A few thousand sectors at the beginning of the drive were probably marked as bad, so the firmware got corrupted again.
This time I managed to fix a few SA modules using the same HDD Repair 2.0 but one of them, namely 4532, wouldn't. Either bad sector(s) or bad remapping.

So I came here for some help, because I already know I did stupid things. Show me a person in this world who never did something stupid. Thing is, is anyone really willing to help?

Over all you on the right track.
This model does not have module 4532.
Some other module might be bad, but still shows as good module.
You have to make sure that you have original copy of your modules and then test writing some unimportant modules back to the drive. If everything looks good, rewrite original modules back.
Pay very close attention to Firmware revision as it could be slightly different from original, which is a sign of bad modules in SA.

When you get it going, find an imager that can image your drive in opposite direction. You can find it online. Image your drive to a good one and then go for data.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

First of all thank you for willing to help!

I don't wanna turn this into sci-fi, but seeing the latest bad luck that came upon me I'd say I must be cursed or something. Worst choices at the worst possible moments.

Anyway, back to the subject. I couldn't back up the original modules of the drive because they had already been destroyed by the first bad run of HDD Regenerator, before I even thought of anything possibly going wrong.

After that, the first module restore went fine and I should've created a drive image then. But... I didn't (and still don't) have ANY spare drive/partition in the house. I'm flat poor. So I had to work on live data. And the second bad run of HDD Reg screwed it all up for good, as there is that one module (I'm not sure if it's exactly 4532 or something close, I forgot and haven't touched that drive since) that wouldn't get rewritten no matter how many times I'd try. All the others that were affected are now OK, so I'd rule out bad heads as data-medics said.

So, as long as the firmware is still corrupt, the BIOS and all the test/repair applications won't detect it properly and won't run their checks. HDAT2, HDD Regenerator, MHDD - none can work. I would assume they would test for bad sectors regardless of the G-list or P-list being cleared and they would just fill in the G-list as they do their job. But since they can't work and I can't fix the bad module, it all seems like a deadlock. Unless there is a tool that can manually (or automatically) assign a new, valid sector to the bad module (assuming the current sector is bad and the G-list doesn't know it). But I don't know of such tool, that is why I came here asking for help.

This is not trolling or anything commercial, it's just an unlucky guy trying to fix what's broken. And I apologize for replying so late, got no notifications from the board and on top of all disasters, my main motherboard got disabled by a bad BIOS update (yes, I'm THAT jinxed!)

(fixed small typo)

N40P are "inherently unstable" drives.

You cannot with that software (unless you really know how N40P and co. work) relocate bads on SA.

The fact that the drive appears DCO FROZEN means that something else configuration related either got corrupted or overwritten. Always have a full backup fo the SA before fiddling with it. Also you should make a loader from your SA, don't know if that SW has the feature for it.
A G-List problem makes either render the drive inoperational (recognised as N40P) or lead to garbled data but there's still hope for recovery (LBAs are accessible but data is garbled).
There are modules that can be "borrowed" from other copies, other NOT.
OR you have to fix them all, except some parts that are unique to your drive.
AND , depending on what you do, it will be dangerous for data.
Final note : if there is a siimple/ 'soft' error rewriting the module fixes it.

I can't help with HDD Repair, anyway - sorry.

P.S. at this stage even a recovery from pro would be relatively easy, everything you do make things worse.

Yeah, I jumped into this head first. But things just unwinded one after another so fast that I had no choice but to try whatever I got at hand.
Found HDD Repair only after the SA corruption, never thought such thing could happen. Should've been an easy scan-and-fix-bad-sectors operation, nothing more.

I did find a loader for the drive and used it succesfully the first time so maybe it should still be valid. Yes, HDD Repair can use a loader and can also build one. I think I did build a loader but I'm not sure it's valid - it looks very different from the one found in the same package with the modules, that I used on first recovery.

I wish I knew which modules are unique and which could be borrowed. But right now the big problem is the one module that doesn't appear to be critical but still wouldn't get fixed. I can only hope it's this module's fault and not some other much deeper. But this software can only do so much and I'm no HDD specialist. On top of it all, I have a very bad memory and tend to forget things very quickly.