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[wackypanda]

Hi again,

I have an Acer Aspire 4745G with 3 NTFS partitions. Windows 7 is installed on one of them, while the other two contain personal data.

One of these two "personal data" partitions is corrupted. There are no unusual noises or other obvious physical defects with the drive itself... I think.

I can't:
- boot into Windows 7; it gets stuck on the "Starting Windows" splash screen
- mount the corrupt partition in Windows or Trinity Rescue Kit
- finish running chkdsk; error message is "the disk does not have enough space to replace bad clusters". The partition had upwards of 200 GB free out of 300 or so before it crashed.

I can:
- place the hard drive in an external casing. If used with Windows, it automatically mounts the other two partitions and assigns a letter to the corrupt one.

Of course, I do not have backups. So I'm trying to figure out the best way forward. I'd attempt data recovery, but I'm not sure what features I need to look for.

Many thanks for any thoughts.

[Wicky]

Recuva is the best, small and tidy program to recover data. For obvious reasons, install it to onto a different partition than the one, which you want to save. Just sayin'

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

[The Fifth Horseman]

I'd suggest trying DMDE to access the borked partition. (you can get it from http://softdm.com/download.html)

[Smiling Spectre]

Best solution, known to me, is GetDataBack. But it is not cheap...