A couple days a go a friend came to me with a problem regarding his laptop, it would POST but immediately reboot and stay in this loop.
I went through played around, pulled the hdd, and tossed it into a spare desktop to test, and it did the same thing.
(when connected to a running computer, windows identifies it as damaged or corrupted)

So, I'm almost positive that it is dying/almost dead. (It was also making a loud whirring and the occasional loud click)
When I tried to pull data from it, it kept crashing file explorer, and finder.
I have had better luck trying to recover using my mac, it's slow, but I can get data off.
(also, while plugged into the mac, it runs silently any ideas on why it acts different between windows and osx)


Anyway, on to the question, if there is corruption that has occurred on the disk, how would I best recover, or check for that?

I have done minor disk recovery before, but I could stand to learn more.


Thank you in advance, and please let me know if I need to add more information.

If data is not important and you accept the risks of DIY, then I would definitely clone the drive independently of OS, with something like ddrescue or hddsuperclone (search this forum) to another (good) drive.

Once you’ve made a clone, then you run some recovery software (I.e. Rstudio, DMDE, eseus etc...) on it and see what it pulls up.

HOWEVER this is AT YOUR OWN RISK, as with DIY you stand a higher chance of killing the drive FOR GOOD, making recovery impossible or at least much more expensive. Especially true in this case, given that the drive is making whirring and clicking noises!!!

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PCIMage,

Thanks for the good idea, I did actually use a physical hdd cloner, the primary windows partition came up as just "RAW" and I was not sure where to go from there.
Is there a big difference between a hardware cloner and a software cloner? I know some do bit/bit.

so, is cloning it is a bad idea (if data is important) because it is hard on the drive and will make it more likely to die on the spot?
also, any recommendations on good free recovery tools? (i'll checkout rstudio)


Thank