I have a hitashi external drive - I am trying my best to recover the info on it. The MBR is safe I assume because when I run Active Partition Recovery, it sees all of the files that are on there. Here is the problem - after trying to recover these files, it says most of the sectors are damaged. Right now I am at 48% and it has only found 4 files. Doesn't bode well for me. Now the files aren't going to make me go broke and no one died, but I would like to get them back - just wondering if there is another way to recover these that doesn't included going to the recovery house and spending between $500 and $5000.

Thanks in advance,

image the drive to another disk before using software utilities on it

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

Right now a computer expert friend of mine is using HDD regenerator on it - but he says it might take up to 2 weeks (running day and night) because it is 1 TB. Can't I let him just start and stop the program? He seems to think that if he stops the regeneration, he will have to start over - but Ithought I would ask anyway...

bye bye data.

HDD regenerator is bad program, and if your friend was a real expert he would know this. Also, 2 weeks intensive read/write to a failing hard disk with potentially valuable information? surely an attempted clone or recovery makes more sense? If professional help is not an option, and your 'expert' friend wants to use HDD regenerator then im afraid Spaz is right, and your data will be lost.

Yeah HDD Regenerator is pretty much the worst possible thing at this point.

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

Ok, so what is the best way to image the drive? Also, he is just trying to help me and at this point, I was glad to have it.

there are quite a few softwares that Image drives, some better than others. IMHO ONLY way to PROPERLY image a drive is with a piece of specialist hardware that works along with a piece of software. Deepspar, Atola Insight etc.

The key to a good HW/SW imaging solution is that it can take action to avoid making things worse during tricky imaging sessions (like restarting or simply powering down the drive). A good HW based solution also has "kinder" power supplies that look for (and sometimes solve) problems. A good solution will skip trouble areas, note them and come back to them (maybe with different imaging patterns) afterward. A typical "download and try" Software will sit a bad sector for ever, of if it jumps after a timeout, it will just sit at the next bad spot. Imagine that on 100,000 bad sectores....

A bad imagining SW or HDD Regenerator, will work an already bad disk to death. Just listen to it and you will be able to hear the thing going crazy.

Bottom line: if the data is unimportant, google "disk imaging Software" and try one. If the data is important, buy the pro gear (about US$4000 to 7000 for the above mentioned solutions) or send it out.

Thanks for that. I told my friend to stop the HDD and he said he had already stopped it because it would have taken months and I suspect he figured out what you had already.
The data is valuable, but not that valuable. I am going to get it back from him, image it using a free imaging program and try Active Partition Recovery on it,using the Ignore mode (he suggested) and see what can be recovered. AT this point, I am going to take it back to the store and get an exchange, but before I do, I will try and recover what I can. Lots of Cycle redundancy errors.

if you have no hurry and want it done quite cheap I can give it a try. No guarantees though and LESS guarantee if you run more "work it baby" software on it
PM me for a quote. I am far. but shipping is cheap and so are we!