Recovering from "Bad HDD"

Please bear with my long set of events
and actions.

I was running a Lenovo Y470 on a 500GB HDD running win 7. While hibernating the computer it went into a freeze. SO I hard reset the computer and started normally and it was stuck at "starting windows" screen. So I reset it and went to system repair to let it fix any errors automatically. It ended saying"cannot fix automatically" or something to that effect. SO I restarted the laptop in safe mode. It was stuck at "CLASSPNP.sys" file. SO upon searching online forums the solution I tried was to change SATA controller mode from "ACHI" to "Compatible". I did that and rebooted. Same thing. But when I restarted system repair it said the same thing. At one point during subsequent system repair attempts I hard reset the computer. From that point on the computer would not boot into system repair itself and right after start screen "Lenovo Screen" it would say cannot boot BCD is not found or similar. So I created an USB win 7 repair disc and then run system repair. This time at the stage where it gives options to repair automatically " it doesnt recognize my OS installation" and states "unknown OS in unknown drive" and then system repair also says "cannot fix automatically" after that. So I made a Hirens bootable CD on an USB and tried booting into mini win xp to see if the drive is visible and if i can copy data. It would not show up the internal drive and file explorer would freeze upon opening. So in an effort to fix the BCD i used cmd commands such as bootrec fixmbr and fixboot and such. I also tried ( I believe by huge mistake) set the 200 MB partition as active as per one online suggestion. After that XP boots faster and file explorer doesnt try to find the internal drive but just the USB. On trying minitool partition wizard the HDD was listed as bad disk (It allowed for partition recovery, but the OS was very slow running on USB, so I did not try it). Then I tried booting Ubuntu from a new USB. Once in got into it I was able to see (I have 2 partitions OS and Data) both partitions, with DAta partition having correct label and unlabelled OS partition. I was able to browse through data partition and could see all folders but was not able to copy files into external as it ended up copying only zero kb files back. And when i restart ubuntu, some folders became empty while other allowed me to copy most files intact and the folder which allowed copying or showed intact files changes upon subsequent restarts. But when i viewed properties of the data partition it gives accurate used space and free space from before the issue. I hope all the data is intact. Can the data be recovered using an USB connector on another win computer using recovery software?

Based in the set of events and actions mentioned above can anyone give me an idea of what had gone wrong and the prospects of recovering data. Please ask for additional details which I might have missed and I would be happy to provide if I can recollect. Huge facepalm for not backing up data

 

Your hard drive is probably in the early stage of media failure. It would be better to clone the drive first and then try using Testdisk to retrieve your files from the drive. Or if you're willing to spend some cost for recovery applications you could try UFS Explorer or GetdataBack.

 

I am planning to connect it via sata to usb to a win computer. Which is the best way to clone the hdd and which recovery sotwares are best in recovering files intact?

 

If you are able to boot from Ubuntu then you could try ddrescue to get a bit by bit clone/image of the problem drive to a new working drive. Then try to use Testdisk to recover the files you wanted to retrieve from the clone/image you got.