Question Recover files from HDD

Apr 4, 2019
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I agreed to help a coworker of mine with her laptop. The HDD is failing. It's a 1TB Western Digital Blue 5400rpm from a Lenovo laptop. I am at my wits end on what to do with it. Even having it plugged in cause my desktop to slow down to a crawl, and it won't even boot with the HDD in, even if set to boot from my regular drive. Accessing it is randomly possible, but I can't get to her personal files, only up to ''Users'' then it hangs.

So far, I tried cloning it with Macrium. It failed. With Acronis, also failed. Fail with Aomei.

I put it into my laptop, booted it with a Lubuntu live CD, can't access files through it either. Couldn't get Clonezilla to start. Tried running PuppyLinux from a bootable USB to start Gddrescue, it never booted.

Tried Testdisk. Still failed. It just hangs and hangs and hangs. Best way to access the drive so far is through USB with an old external drive enclosure. But it is unstable, maybe it is the disk itself, maybe it is the enclosure.

Only thing so far I had some success with is Unstoppable Copier. It managed to copy a chunk of files, though useless ones. But it was slow, we're talking 12h per GB, plugged in to the SATA to USB enclosure.

Tonight I tried running it again with the faulty drive directly in my desktop, but Unstoppable Copier never started and the disk was no longer seen.

I am running out of ideas of things to try at this point.