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'm not sure what your parameters are, but this is what I'd recommend:

Ubuntu and ddRescue. I'd go with five retries per error. Rip a file system image to the Ubuntu machine and only work on the image. Loopback mount the disk image and see what you can copy out of it.

What specific situation are you in? You said that you're not particularly well skilled with Linux (if I'm understanding you correctly), is there more?