HDD expired; one partition accessible, one not - but visible to CHDKSK...?

Hello everyone... I'm hoping for some good advice, as plenty of it is around - I just hope to find something that might fit this problem, too...

My drive (two-year old Seagate), divided in two partitions, suddenly started choking as I was accessing the second partition. After messages about errors and failure while reading the media, XP froze and I reset the PC. Then I noticed a major slowdown while XP was booting from the primary partition; it halted with a blue screen and reset. I tried booting from a snapshot created by a system recovery tool which I use; I also tried using the "last working configuration"; nothing. The primary partition seemed damaged, too. I tried booting with ERD Commander and accessing the drive, but it did not see the primary partition and had major problems reading the secondary one. So, I took the drive out, plugged it as a slave on another system, and tried accessing it from there.

There were major slowdowns every time Explorer or any tool tried to list the available drives, but I accessed the secondary partition and after one night, I successfully managed to recover 90% of the data stored on that partition - then I emptied it and CHKDSK-ed it; several hundred KBs of bad sectors were found; overall, I thought the recovery ratio from that partition was very good though. Time came to try something with the primary partition... and it turned out XP couldn't see it at all. The partition is seen as only a drive letter, without any file system, volume label or capacity (ERD declared it "raw".) Nothing seems to be able to access it from XP.

I would have just considered it DOA if it wasn't for one thing: interestingly, CHKDSK does see the drive. Ran on it, it recognizes it as NTFS and lists its correct volume label. Then a series of errors of "file record segment xxxx is unreadable" starts appearing. I left it for another night of testing (there were hundreds of thousands of those) and it ended - and now I'm wondering what else I could try using to salvage anything from this partition. I will try booting from Bart's PE and doing something there, but I'm not expecting much. Anything else? Any other tools? Recommended ways and utilities to access it from outside XP? Maybe booting to Linux and trying something from it? (I'm afraid that while I have some experience with Linux, it's nothing to write home about)

The "symptoms" are, as I described - major slowdowns every time anything tries to get a listing of available drives or access the primary partition on the Seagate disk, invisibility of anything on or about the drive to all XP tools that I tried, visibility of at least the drive's characteristics and some file records to CHKDSK (not every segment showed up with an error while CHKDSK was testing the drive), almost completely proper access to the second partition of the same disk (apart from those bad sectors.)

Anything recommendable? That includes things that may not work as expected (as long as they could only endanger the damaged Seagate and nothing else - I certainly don't plan to use the drive for anything, and if I can only recover as much data as possible from the inaccessible partition, the disk will then just become a paper weight.)

Thanks in advance...!

 

try ultimate boot disk seagate tools there aer also file sys repair tools maybe give you what you need as well as recovery tools