dd_rescue question

[llino]

I have a 200GB hard drive that I'm trying to recover. The drive was was formated with fat32 and windows couldn't see the partition but linux could

I copied the files but most of them were corrupt so I decited to try to recover the files with getdataback, but the drive had too many physical bad blocks that it kept freezing the application or rebooting windows.

To top that, now I can't even see the partition on linux anymore, and gParted reports unallocated partition.

My question is, can dd_rescue help me recover the data or do I have to recover the partition first?

If so, whats the best way recover the partition?

[Sparda]

If it's an external drive you'll want to take it out of the case and connect it to the motherboard directly.

You can try spinrite but it's only ever worked a single time for my self (out of 4~), so don't count on it.

[VaKo]

If its valuable data then I would pay for it to be done by a professional. I recently tried to recover a disk that had been dropped, all my tricks failed as the files where there, i could read them but they were all corrupted. After a few attempts the disk stopped talking to me entirely, and like your disk, windows showed that it was blank. I went to a company called ontrack, who had all the files back within a week and managed to recover a 3GB PST that was completely corrupted. However, it cost over £1100 for a 80GB disk. YMMV