It is rather risky to recover hard drive partitions on a damaged hard disk drive. There're a lot of opportunities to waste your data, even if you use the best tool set and absolutely sure in all your actions. You must know that all the changes that are done to a damaged disk are irreversible. You can easily destroy vital info about your HDD, files and data. There must be made some substitute for your hard disk before the recovery process.
But there are also some other approaches to data repairing that are safer and easier in usage, that don't need to have backup and restore info. In place of making a backup copy of corrupted data, you may easily create a complete binary snapshot of the drive or partition being recovered, and attempt the fixing with different approaches as many times as you need on this image instead of the actual drive. That's the task of data recovery software.