Hello,

Well, the worst has happened – my hard drive crashed. I had an older computer, an ASUS N73 laptop; it worked fine, but was starting to show signs of age. About half of my data was transferred to another drive a month ago, but unfortunately, the other half is still on this drive, including some scientific data in mechanical engineering prepared for research papers. Well, a good lesson to act sooner next time.

The situation is that a few days ago the laptop refused to boot (see attached Fig.), so I took the PC apart and removed the drive (WD6400BEVT – see attached Fig.). I bought a USB 3 to SATA cable and connected the drive to a new PC. It's partially working: the drive spins, the LED on the ARGUS cable lights up, and it somehow detects the old damaged drive (with partitions). However, it behaves erratically—it detects and freezes, detects and freezes. Partition I: occasionally opens. But my main data is likely on partition H: (when I click on it, File Explorer freezes for a while and becomes unresponsive).

I tried the Disk Drill app, but it doesn't detect the drives, nor can I even open the app. I also tried Windows File Recovery – also without success. Then I browsed the forums and tried GetDataBack Pro. I had a bit more luck there; the app detected all drives, and I scanned the (damaged) 596 GB drive, but it doesn't look very promising – see pictures (maybe I'm wrong, and I'd be very glad if anyone can make sense of these data).

That's as far as I've gotten, and I'm stuck on what to do next. I would appreciate any advice from the experts on this forum. Should I try another software, or is it worth switching to Linux and trying something there?

Connect the drive to an external computer, boot Linux in Live mode, and try to create a binary image of the drive, for example using ddrescue

If the data is that valuable I recommend taking it to a pro. All the scans you are doing could be causing surface damage making the recovery even harder.

Install the problematic hard drive back into the laptop, buy or find another working drive and install it in the external USB case that you are currently using. Create a bootable USB flash drive with opensuperclone and make a complete copy of the problematic hard drive, and then work only with this copy. By bothering this hard drive with scans, you risk that it will fail in the middle of the process, at which point data recovery will end.

And then download dmde or r-studio, getdataback is mediocre software.

Thank you for the constructive suggestions and opinions. I will try making a disk clone.

I followed your advice and installed open-super-clone-live_24.08.02_amd64 on a USB using Rufus.

I booted OpenSuperClone on this problematic laptop (first without the damaged drive) - see Fig 1. Then I turned off the PC and tried booting the laptop with the problematic drive installed - see Fig 2. And it detects both partitions.

So I don't make any mistakes, I'd like to ask if this is the right way, under:
- Choose Source Drive (should I look for the partitions of the damaged WD6400BEVT disk here?)
- Choose Destination - Image file (should I look for a healthy USB disk with enough capacity here, approx. 700GB?)

I suppose the next steps (after Fig 1) would be clicking the 1.) Connect button and then the 2.) Start button.

There are also buttons like SMART, Analyze, Clone Mode... should I leave everything at default, or should I adjust anything specific and important?

If I manage to create an image file of the disk, I would then try DMDE and R-Studio.