Crashing Hard Drive

[Rolin]

I have a laptop hard drive that appears to have several damaged sectors. The person who owns the laptop tried to use the Acer Restore process but failed before it finished.  Now they decided the data is important after all.   So I'm trying to recover the data on a hard drive that is failing and it was reformated with the Acer factory restore process.

I've tried to run the standard iRecover process and it stops responding for days very early in the process. I know this process can take a long time depending on how damaged the drive is, but this stops early on and just doesn't move at all.  I tried to make an image of the drive using iRecover, but it never gets very far and stops solid.  I've tried to max out all settings for skipping bad sectors, etc.

It almost seems like the drive loses "Ready" - the red light on my USB adapter stays on but there is no activity at all. If I hold my ear to the drive I don't hear any accessing or no cycle of noises like it's stuck on a bad sector- nothing.  Question:  Would the "Force reset on bad sector" optoin be of help on this?

The drive has 3 partitions on it. The main OS partition (Windows 7, I believe) can be seen in Windows on another computer, but you have to wait a long time for it will populate, and will eventually lock up the computer.  So, the hard drive still has some life in it.

Need some advice on this one.  I  suspect most of the damage is early in the OS partition, but of course I don't know for sure.  Is there a way to manually mark some of the damaged areas so it won't cause problems with the recovery?   Maybe I could start the recovery at 10 percent into the dirve?  Looking for some suggestions.  

Thank you!

[Tom]

You've already tried the things we would suggest, it seems, but you should probably connect the drive directly if possible. Doing stuff like this over USB can make things go worse than they potentially should.
Apart from that, yes, you can try starting the analysis beyond the area that you consider suspect, but I'm not sure that will help you much in this case. You have everything going against you: bad sectors AND stuff written over (parts of) the original volumes. All I can suggest is give that a try. If you own DiskPatch you could give the clone option a try, but for that to work well you would also need to connect the disk directly.

Creating an image sounds like the best first step, but considering how that went up to now you would definitely first need to try to connect the disk as directly as possible.

[Joep]

Try *without* USB in the way, that's definitely a first step.