Well, I finally got my new CPU today, and I started installing Windows on my new pc, all of which went reasonably fine. When it came to transferring my files over, though, I made a huge mistake. I was going to try and transfer them directly, which meant I'd need two wireless cards. I got an old D-Link 54Mbps card from my stock of random bits and pieces of which their reliability and usefulness can be doubted. This card turned out to be a dud, and gave me a lovely 0x0000007B BSOD when I tried turning it on in my old PC. After taking it out again, all is well, except my D: drive -- full of my videos, music, pictures and various other projects -- is apparently not formatted. I attempted to read it using the Ubuntu LiveCD, which eventually told me there was a "segmentation fault" on it. I tried backing it up with a Paragon tool that came with the Partition Manager, which found two I/O errors in relatively quick succession, and then the machine hung.

I'd noticed one of my drives was making "clunk"ing sort of noises, and I just found out it may be the drive head hitting the platter. I didn't think much of it, as it was fairly old and not in very good shape, but still seemed to be alright anyway.

Is there any way I can get this data back? I can pretty easily get most of the contents back, i just need at least file names to jog my memory though. The only option I seem to have left is getting a professional to try and retrieve as much as possible, but if there's any way I can do it myself, I'd like to try it.

The system is an AMD Athlon @ 1.2GHz with 512MB of RAM, 40GB Seagate HDD (system, fine) 60GB WD WD600BB-22JHA0 (problem drive)

Thanks in advance and sorry if this has been answered before :/

SpinRite does a very good job at recovering data from faulty disks. It's not very cheap though (89 USD), but if there's important data on there it could be worth the money.

Thanks MenthiX. I'm trying it now, so far it's found some empty sectors and two uncorrectable errors. Unless these errors aren't in files I can replace easily, it looks pretty good.

EDIT: i think it should also be mentioned that this drive has been through quite a lot, it's had a whole heap of data on it as what I suspect to be a backup drive, then I put XP on it a couple of times, and then ended up storing my files (about 25GB of mostly Doctor Who actually ). Its fitness according to SpeedFan wasn't all that great, but I didn't think it was that bad, it was only at about 75%.

EDIT2: Spinrite did it for me I've now backed everything up to my laptop ready to be copied onto my new PC. I'm now formatting the drive, and I'm going to take it out and probably keep it in the aforementioned stockpile of odds and ends.