André Polykanine@menelion@caneandable.social
edited

Folks, I need help. A friend of mine handed me a nearly dead HDD with tons of photos and documents. It's a WD My Passport 500 GB, very old, making funny noises but not too much. Windows sees it, diskpart says file system: raw.
What is the best way of attempting to recover the data? We don't care about the HDD itself, just the files on it.
After some investigation I found GNU DdRescue (needs to load into Ubuntu which is a bit daunting, I have no experience working with Linux Desktop and screen readers really); R-Studio and a couple more pieces of software for Windows.
Any ideas, comments, suggestions are hugely appreciated.
UPDATE. From the replies I've gotten so far (thank you so much folks!), I think I was not clear enough: what I count to do is to copy the HDD byte by byte into an img file, then calmly work on that copy. Thanks again!
#HDD #Windows #AskFedi #FediHelp #RecoverData

Den of Earth@DenOfEarth@mas.to

Replying to @⁨menelion@caneandable.social⁩

@menelion
Saw the freezer option and that may well work, though I was going to propose the opposite:

I had a system that had been running for years which I had to shut down to replace a card. When I powered it back up the hard drive was very rattly and crunchy. I thought maybe the spindle bearings needed to warm up first. I was able to spin up the drive and delay the boot process. I gave it 15 minutes and then booted it, it worked. Was able to backup and replace the drive shortly afterwards. Might work for you.

All other comments still apply: if you can get the drive turning, do a block copy to memory and extract the photos from there. Trying to do file-level recovery from the old drive will only put more pressure on it and increase the risk of failure.

Good luck

en