It's rather risky to repair hard drive partitions on a damaged hard drive. There're many possibilities to lose your info, even if you utilize the best tools and really certain in all your deeds. Alterations that can be made to the damaged drive are irrevocable. You must bear in mind that it is really simple to destroy the structure of vital information about your disk. Bottom line: it's good to substitute before performing disk recovery. But is this really the best way to do it?
You can find the other approach to data restoration process that may be even safer and easier and it does not need to have backup. There's a system of total double image that you may use to your drive or the partition that is being recovered. After that you can make a recovery with the various methods on this snapshot for as many times as you need. This is one of the possibilities of data recovery software.