Hi.
I have had a WD20EARS for a long time that has served me well as a storage drive.
A few months ago, my computer started hanging at the "windows screen" during boot. I thought my motherboard was dead but it turned out that disconnecting this drive made everything normal again.

At first, I did not give too much thought to the loss of this drive as I thought there were only run of the mill downloads on it. But with time, I could think of more and more things that are on this drive and for which I had no backup. I have finally bought a 2To drive for backup and I'm ready for tweaking. Which got me here...

So the drive makes no unusal sound. It powers up. I would just say it is much quieter than a normal drive but I guess that's normal as I cannot really put it to work.
It is always recognized in the bios with the right name.

If I start to boot on it, it says (as expected: it is not and has never been a boot drive):


If I boot with the disk connected (same behaviour with different sata cables and connectors that work perfectly with other HDDs), windows hangs which seemed for and infinite period of time but yesterday, after between one hour and three hour of hanging (I wasn't there) it started a chkdsk on the drive that was super super slow:

and 47 minutes later (to give a sense of speed):

I interrupted it.

Finally, if I boot and connect the drive afterwards, I can sometimes see the drive in windows but can never access the data (it hangs), I can also see it on disk management although I have to connect it after disk management is loaded otherwise it hangs when I launch it. It then shows one partition of the right size which is what is expected.
I can also see it on a laptop from a USB2 external enclosure but no data is accessible.For usually a brief period of time before it hangs, I can access the "properties":






So first, thanks if you've read through here! Second, if you have any suggestions as to what I should do/try next or any insights about what my hdd's ailment is, I'm all ears! Thanks in advance.

Thanks Spildit.
The thing is I had already chosen another path when I got your message. I cloned the drive on ddrescue.
It worked in about 8 hours with an error size of 24Mb and 59 errors.
So I relaunched the ddrescue for a few pass (3 or 4) and now I have an error size of 1,35Mb and 360 errors.

Since the error size keeps going down and the number of errors is going down to (from as high as 700 to 360 now), I keep running ddrescue. I think I'm reaching the point of diminishing returns though. Not sure what to do.

The next step is to admit that I will have some error remaining and try the new cloned drive on windows. Then it looks like rstudio might be the next step if the disk does not work well. Is there any advice you can give me about the rstudio process?
Thanks!

The following thread suggests that using the "--direct" option may achieve better results.

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?t=1819

You might also like to see whether HDDSuperClone extract a little more data.

Zabkar's Maxim: You can always squeeze a little more toothpaste out of an empty tube.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thank you. It turns out I was already using -d which is similar to --direct.

Can someone give me a heads-up on the rstudio process? Is it always necessary? What does it do? How long does it last? (my disk is 2 Tb). Thanks.