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

@menelion I sometimes have had luck with Recuva, which runs under windows and is made by the same people who also made CCleaner. It works decently with NVDA and I assume JAWS as well. Of course I don't know if it will help you in this case, but hope it might.

@crazydutchy Thanks, will consider also.