IT'S FIXED, well not really, but at least I was able to get files off of the old drive.
I posted a message very early this morning about this, and I have a good memory of posting, but the message isn't here, so maybe I was dreaming due to lack of sleep.
I couldn't clone the drive because it was a 160GB drive and the closest I have to that is 100GB. I couldn't use a partition tool to adjust the size of the image since there was so much corruption on the drive, so that option was out. Compression didn't work either.
I also couldn't use an old DOS disk because of the large disk size and NTFS format on the drive. Plus I didn't want to do anything that would actually write to the drive.
Then I tried my Ultimate Boot CD again and looked at more tools on it for data recovery, and at about 11:30PM last night, after 2 full evenings of trying all sorts of tricks with no luck, I found a tool that actually saw some of the data on the drive. It was only the folders on the root of the drive, but it was something, and that something gave me the motivation to keep trying.
The tool kept erroring out when trying to go any deeper than just the folders on the corupted drive, and it was the most recent version. I looked up the error code, and while others on the internet had the same problem, there was no clear answer for how to get around it.
Then I started looking into non-free software. It was just before midnight that I came across a program called Active Undelete. I ran it, and it not only saw my folders on the root of the drive, but also sub-folders and files. Granted, it did hit a whole slew of bad sectors and took a while to scan the drive for files, it was the first sign that I may actually get data back after trying over 40 different tricks and software pieces over the course of about 14 hours up to that point.
I used Active Undelete to restore a small .txt file since the demo was limited to files smaller than 64KB in size, and sure enough, it was valid. SO I needed to get a licensed copy and see what happens. Within minutes I had it and installed it from my Ultimate Boot CD O/S session.
Again, it had to scan past all of the errors, but by about 12:30AM, I was recovering data that I thought I would never see again. Heck, I was even recovering data that I had deleted back in May 2004. I didn't realize it until I had restored a couple thousand old files, so I just let them go.
I monitored the progress and could only go a folder (and it's sub-folders) at a time, and since I didn't want the ENTIRE drive, I had to pick only certain folders, wait until they were recovered, and select another folder. I think that it was about 4AM before I fell asleep, and then it was a couple more "sessions" this morning copying more data off, but I think that I now have all of it.
I tried, through the course of this, all of the things that were recomended here, most before they were posted, and they simply didn't work. I do GREATLY appreciate the help that everyone offered, and I am sure that what was recomended works in many other situations, but just not mine because of the high amount of damage on the drive.
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
