Inaccessible hard drive - bad blocks

I have a backup, internal hard drive (not mine) that is inaccessible. It stopped showing up in 'My Computer' on Win XP. The event viewer shows that it has bad blocks. The hard drive was looked at by a professional who said it's damaged and needs to be replaced.

Is there any way at all to at least temporarily gain access to the hard drive in order to back it up? The owner used it as their back up hard drive, but failed to put anything on DVD. Both drives ended up failing and now all their important files are gone.

I suspect the hard drives were damaged by the computer being moved while it was on. I believe it was pulled out of the desk and the front end was sat on the floor at angle for several minutes. The computer seems to have worked fine before that, but not after. So I suspect the drives were physically damaged since both seem to fail around the same time.

 

I had to deal with a case like that with a laptop hard drive. The client wanted all the photos from it. It was like over 10 GB's in photos. I first did a check disk with "ultimate boot cd" and it indeed had bad sectors. I used Acronis and made an image of "my pictures" folder which was where all the pics were located. And about 98% of the photos were saved and sound. Only very few were corrupted. Maybe this can work for you.

 

Hello,
Minitools Power Data Recovery (free for home use) can retrieve files from a corrupted partition. You might want to give it a try. The computer has to see the drive though.