It doesn't pick up a red NTFS partition like the first time?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Unfortunately, no. Not sure why that is but it could be an indicator that the partition is more damaged than I suspected. I ordered a new external drive and I'm going to make a clone of the original one with it

Well gentlemen, the issue has been resolved. This is a pretty late update (considering my last post was in October of 2012). I'm updating the topic just in case anyone ever stumbles upon a similar issue and needs help.

After my last post, I sort of gave up and forgot about it for a while. I decided a couple of days ago to start back up again to try to fix the issue. Testdisk by CGSecurity is the application that really worked wonders. Instead of recovering the raw files, I used Testdisk's analyze mode to find my damaged NTFS partition. I then overwrote my boot sector with my backup boot sector and then performed a chkdsk /r in command prompt to recover my files.

The entire process I followed can be found here

After doing the above, my hard drive was still corrupted so I had to perform chkdsk /r. You may or may not have to do this depending on your situation.

Thanks for all the help and support in this thread!

Glad you managed to get your data back.

For the benefit of anyone else finding this thread in future - do not do the same as the (lucky) OP here, by changing the original drive using Testdisk and chkdsk. In both cases, the changes are typically irreversible, so if they make things worse, then you're stuck with that! Typical advice would have included discussions about cloning, as was suggested earlier on, but needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis, depending on the drive's symptoms, how the original problem was caused etc.

Anyway, as I said, glad you were successful.

This was interesting case. Can you define "resolved" a bit more? What is the final outcome as far files recovered working? Corruption? Etc.

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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

Good point about attempting this on a cloned drive, Vulcan. For me personally, if the drive became damaged beyond repair, I would've just accepted the loss of data. For those who have extremely important information, definitely follow Vulcan's advice.

Well, labtech, as far as I can tell, most of the files I've tested work perfectly without any corruption. I haven't tested every file yet but things are looking good so far. The only issues I can express are that I'll get the occasional message that says the recycle bin of the drive is corrupt and should be formatted and one time it said that the entire drive needs to be formatted to be used; I didn't format but all the files disappeared and I had a mild heart attack but, after restarting the PC, they reappeared.

Strange, but great. Successful outcome. Would recommend making a new spanking backup of the files onto a stable newly formatted drive.

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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

I definitely will