I have found 3 bad sectors on my WDC WD3200BEVT-22ZCT0 ATA Device when i did a quick scan with HDTune.

I have two questions:

1. Can I recover data from bad sector? If yes, which is the best tool to do that.

2. I want to atleast backup all the data which are not in those bad sectors. How can I do that.
Every time I try to copy files from the drive (using linux, windows or dos) it just hangs for a very very long time. I usually have to power off using the poser button. I understand it happened when one of the bad sector files is tried to access. But i cannot even browse to a folder and select files as I do not know which ones are in bad sector and which are not. So is there a way I can get all the data on good sectors at once and skipping the files in the bad sectors.

I scanned the drive with HDTune because I could not copy files from the drive. Tried some simple scanning and arror checking tools then finally scanned woth HDTune which found 3 bad sectors. and 55 Unstable Sectors under the Health tab (Current Pending Sector). I am not sure if the hardware is the problem or the firmware (read on some forums firmware sometimes causes this problem)

UPDATE : Yesterday it was 55 Unstable Sectors (HDTune > Health > Current Pending Sectors) and today it shows 396.!!!!

I would really appreciate a quick reply.

Thank you in advance

The disk is failing (head/s becoming weak). Copy IMPORTANT data (don't concnetrate on a total backup that in this codition is impossible to do safely) and replace. Note : more power on time = less chances. It can fail definitively without notice.