[CSFreak]

My secondary, slave, ntfs drive has for some time now been malfunctioning, I thought I could restore the files via my backups so I have been ignoring it, but since i ve recently found out i can't i am trying to do something about it now. The drive was functioning just right about six months ago, but since then the following happened. I was getting delays and freeze ups when trying to access it, and for some time i kept getting the windows xp chkdsk feature on startup, after ignoring it for some time, i let it run, and then upon loading the os the drive would not respond, it would show there, with its full capacity, 40gb, but inaccesible and all 40gb appearing as free space. Since then i ve run the chkdsk start up feature quite some times (the fix errors util in the properties tab wont work within windows) and this is what happens every time. In step 1, file verification, it finds several "file record segment unreadable", about sixty or so, and takes about 10 mins to complete, step 2 with the index verifycation, this takes about a minute or so, with a few "correcting error in index x for file y" messages, and then onto step 3 recovering info, where after a few minutes it halts and messages "insufficient disk space to recover data" (initially i thought that the master drive had too much and wouldnt let the util write its temporary files there, but alas this is not the case) "error" and then it stops loads up xp only to have the same over again on the next start up. I really do want my files back so i ve downloaded a few utils to help me out, but i wont use them unless someone more knowledgeable helps me out, because i know i might do still more harm than good. I ve got the two file recovery standards, getdataback and r studio, plus something called partition table doctor, and another prog going by the name of hdd regenerator by some russian bloke that claims to actually physically repair bad sectors.

But i need your help here, to shed some light on all that, and i wont go ahead with anything until someone is kind enough to explain the procedures.