Ok, problem starts with me finding out that i have bad sectors in my disk (alot of them), so i google a solution to this. I dl and run HDD regenerator and it says that I must make a bootable USB and then restart my laptop. When I do this it gives me a prompt for a command interpreter, so I restart to find a message saying something along the lines of "Disk read error".

Put a new HDD in and put vista on it. Old hdd is in a SATA enclosure and when plugged in it does not show in My computer. Disk Management shows it as unreadable, but after a rescan of the disks it says that it is not initialised. Initializing it doesn't work, gives a error:

"An unexpected error has occured. Check System Event Log for more information on the error. Close the Disk Management console, then restart Disk Management, or restart your computer."

System Event Log:

Log Name: System
Source: Virtual Disk Service
Date: 06/02/2009 20:45:26
Event ID: 1
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: Kenny-PC
Description:
Unexpected failure. Error code: 45D@0200001A
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
<System>
<Provider Name="Virtual Disk Service" />
<EventID Qualifiers="49664">1</EventID>
<Level>2</Level>
<Task>0</Task>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2009-02-06T20:45:26.000Z" />
<EventRecordID>1020</EventRecordID>
<Channel>System</Channel>
<Computer>Kenny-PC</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data>45D@0200001A</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>

Somewhere along the way I have also determined that it has a damaged master boot record.

Any ideas as to what to do from here guys?

Your hard drive looks too dead to repair.

Any suggestions as to how i could go about repairing it. I know it may be dead, but i don't want to give up so easily given the important stuff on it.

jbennet means repair by software that can save data. The principal steps to recover the drive are:

1/
Get the exact HDD model details and use themn to find, download & run a low level formatter. The formatter shoud find the drive.

2/
Then FDISK the drive that has been low level formatted, then format it the normal way and you should be reasy to use it again.

Would it make the data anymore recoverable if i managed to fix all the bad sectors? That's what I have apparently done. It is also being recognised in My computer, although it says i need to format it.

I didn't suggest this because I thought the disk couldn't be accessed in the USB enclosure.

So yes - your last chance before low level format is (e.g.) Chkdsk. The bad sectors can go either way. At worst the files in those sectors will be rendered beyond use and those files will be key OS files. At best they'll be data files - maybe that's at worst in your case!

If it's OS files, then a Repair from the Windows CD should fix that. But yes - you're on your way. Keep us posted.

Having trouble - think its the mbr and vista disk does nothing about it really. (used command prompt with command "Bootrec /FixMbr") HDD still isn't detected by the disk (when u insert vista disk and press r it does not list my HDD) but Partition Doctor 3.5 recognises the partitions on my disk and that they should be NTFS and something else but im afriad of using it because it is built for XP and vista MBR is different. CHKDSK doesn't work on non-formatted HDD's.

if your windows boot up and you can acces the drive from a usb or even from your internal attachment. use a program name easy recovery to recover your files. then you can format the hard disk. i use this program to recover a sid that was giving a I/o error when i try to acccess it from windows.

anoterh good data recovery is getdataback for NTFS or FAT

Yea I am using getdataback. Would i be able to activate my version of vista, my laptop has the code on bottem so my brother helped himself to it when he wanted vista on his computer.