How to recover the data from the crashed (external) hard disk drive (NTFS)?

The 300 GB harddisk has 2 partitions,90 GB and 200 GB! I can see the drives in windows(XP) but unable to access them, the file system is shown as RAW, 0 used space and 0 free space!..chkdsk returns the error "unable to determine volume version and date. chkddsk aborted." Is the MBR corrupt? How do I restore it?

TestDisk tool isn't recognizing the partitions and says invalid entry for heads/cylinder, 15 and should be 255 and suggests to change it..Should I go ahead and change it?

Please advise!

Solution 1:

For DATA recovery, I normally use both D.A.R.T. XP or more recently Recuva. Recuva is nice and free and simple. But DART XP to me seems to work deeper, faster and even on RAW HDD if I remember correctly. I do believe it also have a rebuilding feature to make HDD readable for recovery of data.

Personal Usage of DART XP

D.A.R.T. XP

Recuva - Free

Solution 2:

I used Powerquest Partition Table Doctor or Active@ Partition Recovery (I installed both but don't remember which one made the trick, I guess both work though) to fix a damaged partition (all the data was made available again).
Prior to that, I had successfully recovered most of the data on this partition to a backup drive using GetDataBack.