cloning a damaged hard drive

[[21CW]killerofall]

I have a hard drive that got damaged (had 3 NTFS partitions that are all damaged) and I want to make a clone of it to another hard drive so I can attempt a recovery without damaging data on the original drive. I have 3 OS's on my system: Vista on one HDD(not the damaged one), and XP and Ubuntu Linux on another HDD (I just installed those OS's and I think that I did something while messing with installing XP that messed it up. I have very little knowledge of Linux and don't know even how to install programs and compile on the OS so I want to avoid using a solution (unless it is a GUI) on that if possible.) I tried Norton Ghost but it didn't even see the other hard drive or its partitions. I have used a data recovery tool (1st NTFS Recovery 3.3.1.0) to look at the hard drive and it shows the 1st partition as a FAT16 one (where windows just shows it as a RAW one and Partition Magic (on XP) shows the entire hard drive as bad) and it can "see" the data on the drive as well as finding the other 2 partitions (NTFS) and the data on those. I know the start sectors of the 2nd and 3rd partitions. I want to transfer the data to another HDD so I can attempt to recover the partitions/data without messing up the original data if I screw up. The 1st thing I am going to try is to convert the 1st partition (FAT16) to NTFS to see if that fixes the problem. If you know how I can clone the HDD and/or how to recover the data for little or no $ (I would rather not spend any $ at all but if I have to I will) I would really appreciate it.

 

[[21CW]killerofall]

I have so far been able to recover 2 of the 3 partitions (the ones that really mattered) and am still in the process of recovering the 3rd. I used the program PTDD Partition Table doctor to fix the partitions. First I used TestDisk to recover the 3rd partition but was unable to recover the first 2 but somehow I lost the last one when I switched to the PTDD program. The partitions were called (in the order that they physically exist on the hard drive: Storage 3, Storage 1, Storage 2) and currently I have recovered Storage 1 and 2. I will update thread when I have recovered all 3 partitions or have been forced to format Storage 3.

 

[idea]

knoppix live CD (free), burn it and boot it. after that its one command, just one.

dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/sdY conv=noerror,sync bs=512

replace X and Y with the letters of the drives. if you don't know what that means, ask us and we will tell you. for god sakes do NOT mix up the source (if) and destination (of) drive.

read more: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050302225659382

 

[[21CW]killerofall]

I was able to either see storage 3 or storage 1 and 2 but not all 3 at the same time (strange I know) so I just coped the few files that I needed from Storage 3 and made it so that I could see Storage 1 and 2. Then I formated the space that was Storage 3 and made a new Storage 3 and copied the files that I had put unto another drive back to Storage 3. So I lost a few GB of some stuff that I should have deleted earlier but didn't cause I had the space. I was able to save all of the important data (porn and some other very hard to find files/programs) and thats all that really matters.