Gaming Need help trying to kickstart a semi-dead HDD.

[fgghjjkll]

Hey guys

I have a sibling who likes to destroy my stuff when he's angry, and lately, my laptop fell victim to one of his fits.
He decided to beat up my laptop and throw knives at it, and I think the shock from all that abuse must've broken my HDD(some toshiba one, 7200RPM 500GB), as the system could no longer read from the drive at that point and it BlueScreen'd, unable to save the dump to the disk.
From there, it began to auto-start Startup Repair, whether it would be booting normally, or into safe mode.
I'm on my wit's end trying to rescue my disk, having tried replacing the non-loadable drivers with working copies, fixing the MBR and boot drive, trying to chkdsk /r which would take mere minutes but not find any issues (even though startup repair reports Problem Signature 07: BadDisk... lol...),

I managed to dig up Norton Ghost 2003 and a Momentus XT 500GB to clone my HDD to, but Norton reported bad sectors and was unable to continue.
As I am typing this up, Norton Ghost 15 is scanning my disk and "attempting repairs." (Not that it's doing much. It's been stuck on 4/5 for the past 4 hours.)

I'd rather not reinstall the system, as reconfiguring the Switchable Graphics from a fresh copy of Windows 7 x64 Ultimate was already insanity-inducing, and to be honest, I have a lot of software installed that I'd rather not hunt down since my Internet connection is god awful at the moment.

So if there is a chance I can recover my HDD, even temporarily so I am able to clone it in time, I would love to know!

Please help me! T_T

~fgghjjkll

EDIT: Just so you know, the disk IS readable and writable, but I think it's just a few sectors that have instantly died from the shock.
EDIT2: I went back to have a quick look to see how Norton Ghost 15 is doing, and I do see progress! Perhaps this may be my lifeboat out of this!

 

[Originality]

To me it sounds like physical damage to the platter. You may be able to recover the data, but I don't think you'll be able to use the drive after this. Damaged platters cause .IO errors.

 

[Flame]

you shoudl try the freezer method.

 

[Anon10W1z]

CloneZilla, a hard drive cloning boot CD, has an option to disregard bad sectors. Try using it.

 

[fgghjjkll]

Thanks for all your replies, guys.
Norton Ghost 15 is still running, and has been for the past 20 hours. Originality's probably right. An entire platter got destroyed and recovering all those sectors is painfully slow work, but at least I know it's working.
If that doesn't work, I'll try out the freezer method... I think those bad sectors may have some of my original work there, too... :C

 

[FAST6191]

Freezer is more for stuck heads, sticky spindle or sticky bearings than gouges to the platter or proper physical damage like this. If you do then try then double bag it and stick a bit of that silica gel stuff in with the drive (no need to kill it with moisture).

As others have said it is more likely a damaged drive so consider yourself lucky you can retrieve any data that you can. Usually in such cases I would boot to a liveCD and copy everything I can to an external/alternative drive and anything that says I/O checksum then skip it, if there is something truly vital and it is not encrypted or compressed that much then maybe one of us can try to guide you through sector level recovery via hex editor or if you can recover part of the file via a conventional copy then that as well but it will take hours and probably not recover all that much.

 

[Jamstruth]

He threw knives at your laptop? Your brother owes you a new laptop. Badly.
Also I agree with Originality that harddrive is dead. All you can hope to do is recover as much data as possible.