HDD data recovery

[mikee]

I am buying one of these
Thermaltake BlacX N0028USU Hard Drive Dock - 2.5/3.5 SATA to USB 2.0 at TigerDirect.com

and I was wondering I have a client who's hdd has a bunch of bad secters all of a sudden and windows won't boot. Will I be able to plug this hard drive into another computer with this and recover the data with a recovery program.


So my questions are: does anyone know of a free or cheap good program that I can use to get the valuable files off the drive?

Will I be able to scan with a program like chkdsk while the drive is in this and potentially fix the fix the bad sectors or mark them as bad?

Why would a computers hdd develop so many bad sectors that it refuses to boot? (see this thread)
http://www.computerforums.org/hardware/dvd-drive-compatible-compaq-103518.html

This thing worked fine a week ago and I installed a dvd drive then a few days later these problems start happening.
I tested the computer with the new dvd drive disconnected and still does the same thing. The reasdon I know it's bad sectors is because I used an ubuntu cd and went into the disk manager and it said the drive had many bad sectors and wouldn't allow me to mount it.

I know this is a sort of complex assortment of problems I am dealing with but can someone help me out

Thanks

 

[JCB1]

Plug hes hard-drive in to another computer then try using the chkdsk on it, then try to copy the data

it could be that the hard-drive is developing a hardware fault, slowerly

 

[mikee]

Thats what the hdd dock is for will I still be able to run chkdsk on it through that?

Also the client said the drive was only 6 months old

 

[Aastii]

Yes you will still be able to, you just change the drive letter that is being scanned. By default, C:\ will be scanned, say the HDD in the dock is E:\ you would change chkdsk to scan drive E:\ instead.

And the age doesn't matter, you just got unlucky with it. Unfortunately it happens sometimes, and that is what warranty is for

 

[Celegorm]

Yes you will. It will act like any other internal hard drive.

 

[mikee]

chk disk will still be able to repair it though if it finds anything? I mean bad sectors cant really be fixed but marked for exclusion

 

[cboucher]

Try HDD Regenerator. I've used it to temporarily repair damaged hard drives long enough to at least get the important data off of them. It doesn't permanently fix hard drives, but may buy you enough time to back up the data.