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

Yes, you should not work on the data directly on that disk, but make a copy first on another storage device, at the bit level.

If these are important documents I'd recommend to ask a professional.

I would recommend to look at photorec and their windows tool, if you're not familiar with the Linux desktop.

They have a guide for who to recover files
https://photorec.net/#getting-started

Most importantly: don't panic

Don't stress about the process, take your time.

Good luck 😊