dead hard drive - need restore help

[posnera]

My 2008 MBP was dropped and I now have disastrous errors. I was getting 3-4 minute long beach balls to even click on an item in the finder, not to mention a 10-15 minute bootup time. I booted from the Snow Leopard disk and am now running disk utility to repair. The name of my OSX partition is no longer the same, and when I try to use the reboot function, that partition is no longer available to choose.

Disk Utility is reporting a ton of errors and hasn't repaired any of them as far as I can tell. First, there is an Invalid node structure error and then an attempt to rebuild catalog b tree. This is being followed up by a neverending string of invalid record count, invalid key length and invalid node structure errors. I will let this run for several hours, just incase something good will happen. I'm assuming not.

So, here are my questions:
I've got most of the OSX partition backed up with Time Machine. I will try to put the computer into Target Disk Mode to see if I can recover any other stray files (not critical). I know I can reinstall Snow Leopard and restore from Time Machine for my OSX partition.

How can I go about doing the same for my Win7 Bootcamp partition? I haven't tried booting into Windows yet. Is there a program which can clone the partition while in target disk mode? My Windows partition is not particularly important, and I can always just reinstall from scratch if necessary.

Any advice?

 

[Prodo123]

How can I go about doing the same for my Win7 Bootcamp partition? I haven't tried booting into Windows yet. Is there a program which can clone the partition while in target disk mode? My Windows partition is not particularly important, and I can always just reinstall from scratch if necessary.

It probably won't boot into Windows in the first place, since your hard drive has crashed (or is about to crash).
If you have important data on there, try booting into a Linux live USB (e.g. Ubuntu, DSL, Fedora) and salvage data from there.

 

[posnera]

Well, disk utility officially can't repair the disk. I was able to boot into Windows, so I guess the whole drive isn't completely shot.

 

[Prodo123]

Easeus has a backup program that works well. http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/

 

[posnera]

So using that program I can clone to an external drive, then when my disk is back in working order I can clone it back to a BootCamp partition?

Oddly enough, I can access my OSX partition while booted into windows. I think my best first step is to recover what I need from the OSX partition, then reinstall Snow Leopard, recover from Time Machine and see what happens next.

I will also clone the BootCamp partition just in case.

The drive isn't making any scary noises, so I don't know if there is any physical damage. Maybe a reinstall will resolve my issues.