Partition unformatted

[Yohanan]

Hello!
I come here for the first time to ask the following question:
My secondary (non-system) hard disk is quite old. Lately one of it’s partitions (primary) is seen as “unformatted”, both in explorer and in Partition Magic. I am able to salvage most of the data with TestDisk (but not the right filenames or filesystem, which is important), or can see the all of the filesystem with Active Partition Recovery, but can not recover it (error message is something like “can not recovery because it overlaps…”).
I am kinda scared of deleting this partition now, with only slight hope that I will be able to repair it with Active Partition Recovery later. What I want to do is to copy all the filesystem from that disk to some place on the primary disk, so I can get a new disk instead of the faulty one. Any ideas/tools that can help in it?
Thanks

 

[gavinseabrook]

Try windows backup. Start>All Programs>Acessories>System Tools> Backup. Might help, but if the drive is going out, might be a little difficult to recover your files.

 

[Nodsu]

Do you need all the files? Any file recovery software will fetch you most of the data. Try PC Inspector File Recovery - it's free

 

[Yohanan]

Thanks, Nodsu!
As upon your advice, i tryed "PC Inspector File Recovery". It's a nice program, that succeeded in recovering some of my files. However, it did not recover well PDF, DOC and some of the picture files.
Therefore i tried some more with TestDisk - and what a joy, i succeeded! All of the partition was recovered. Now i have to go and buy a new disk instead of this one
Anyway, thanks for the help!