André Polykanine

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

It seems, #Fable helped me to find a mysterious bug in #Windows #UIAutomation core. Nice! #ClaudeCode

Okay people, new instance, new #Introduction!
I'm Andre, a (mostly) backend software engineer and accessibility specialist from Ukraine living in Strasbourg, France.
I'm married and happy, we have two cats.
My main interests are #Technology, #Books, #Music, #Languages, #Accessibility.
I'm blind from birth, if it matters (it may, because I will ask for image descriptions if you send me images without alt text).
My operating system of choice is #Windows, my AI coding assistant is #ClaudeCode, my smart speaker assistant is #AmazonAlexa.
I use my phone far more seldom than 99% of you, preferring my laptop.
I love various kinds of music, especially renaissance and traditional folk music of most peoples of the world.
I'm Pagan, but I revere Jesus christ and his Mother Mary (it might sound complicated, so ask if interested, I'm open to such discussions), so Christians won't see any blasphemy in my posts.
I like talking politics also, but in our times it becomes tougher and tougher, as many people tend to take bold actions if you disagree with them politically. Long story short: I'm pro-Occidental, pro-American, pro-European, leaning right.
I'm in the beginning of develloping our small business (together with my wife, of course). We have some smaller pieces of software and libraries, also my wife has finished a hexalogy (six-book series) of fantasy novels, for now in Russian, but I hope we'll find ways to translate at least into English and French.
That was long already, so ask for more. Oh yeah, I'm a language nerd!