Hi all,

I have a Samsung (M40) HDD here that identifies itself and the partition and defects tables fine in HUTIL, but locks up with repetitive seeking noise when accessing the beginning of the disk space. Now I'd like to try whether I can access high blocks to retrieve the data from the second (data) partition, but I have no idea so far what program to use. I don't want to risk too much, for example by hot plugging the disk to a booted unix system and then try a dd at a specific location.
A combination of available tools would be prefered over some sophisticated multiple-tenthousand-dollar-turnkey-solution as I am about to learn...

There are very few tools that allow you to copy head by head. If your data is important you should send it to a DR company.