Recovering from head crash

[time]

I'm attempting to salvage a Samsung 200GB SATA drive with head crash symptoms, specifically, two bad areas. What's frustrating me is that the first area at least is right in the middle of the directory/FAT data (it's a 10GB FAT32 partition), and most of the files and directories are consequently inaccessible, eg the Windows directory and 13,000 odd files are missing ...

I tried GetDataBack and another recovery utility, but I end up with at least 65 directories to rename and reposition, and I suspect there should be more than just a dozen files in the Windows (XP Home) directory?

I believe I can read the Documents and Settings directories; any advice on the best course of action? It's hard to accept that two bad spots on a partitioned drive can render the whole thing unusable.

 

[Sol]

In a case like this I would attempt to make a raw image of the drive and then use a copy of that image to try to recover data, that way you know you can't lose any more data whilst trying to recover stuff. Also once you have the image read errors should be much faster since there should be no need for error correction to try to re-read data.