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

Replying to @⁨menelion@caneandable.social⁩

@menelion Of course, if the harddisk makes weird noises, and especially if its really important, you need to ask yourself how much risk you are willing to take, or when it may be time to look into professional file recovery. I know, that is likely expensive. I have gotten lucky a few times, but also unlucky, so just wanted to put that out there.

en