I literally just lost a HD partition a few days ago (turned RAW on me and has bad sectors) and this recovered all my files and maintained the directory structures too:
I also recommend dd as mentioned before. I assume that the g in “gddrescue” stand for gnome or gtk? Depending on the distro, to ddrescue or dd_rescue will launch the ddrescue application. Maybe try gddrescue or gdd_rescue from a terminal if you cannot find it in the application tray/menu.
In any case, you need to at least have the same amount of bits free on the destination drive in order to copy a whole partition or make a disk image. There are tools that will allow you to compress the free space on the source disk at time of imaging but that will take longer which you do not want to waste on a failing drive. dd will make a bit for bit copy, free space and all. I would dump the drive to a drive that you trust with enough space.
I can’t even find the command to start ddrescue, I’m at a complete loss.
So it looks like I’ll have to buy another 2TB drive if I want to make an image. I didn’t even half fill it the four years I’ve had it. I may just destroy it then as I very much doubt making an image will work seeing the errors I’m getting.
I’d rather spend the money on a bunch of DVDs and lose data bit by bit than the instant loss of a drive going just like it did.
If you have your important files in one or 2 folders target them.
I had a dying drive and was able to save everything I wanted just but getting it to work for 5 min as a slave drive. This was back in the day obviously
I feel you. That that is what happened with my Seagate drive that was the backup drive. That is why I bit the bullet and only by SSDs that default to a read only state when they fail. I would rather be able to read the data and get it off safely, than an HHD with huge capacity and insta-fail.
So far, I have not had an SSD die on yet. I buy Crucial drives for storage and backup. I actually just picked up an MXX500 1TB for 249USD on Amazon two days ago. I also picked up an MX500 250GB for 85USD not too long ago as well.
Yeah, that’s a really good idea. I liked that when I’ve had USB drives die on me too. Although I did read some where on here that Samsung drives don’t do this (typically I’m running an EVO as a boot drive).
I learnt how much space I really needed when I got an 120GB ssd for my laptop, I can do what I do without TBs of space. Just had to let go of films and a few games.
does it make clicking sounds?
Not the regular read/write ones but very distinct clicking sounds?, allmost rythmic, if so unplug it now.
then attach it to a USB to sata bridge(run of the mill usb harddrive adapter).
and firstly image the drive. Then try something like testdisc to recover data.
and do so off something like a ubuntu livedisc.
It wasn’t ticking, just nothing was reading it or acknowledging it was there.
No machine was picking the drive up at all so I put it in the freezer for two hours (I did watch the videos on why not to do this, I was more worried about water shorting out the whole system). Waited a few minutes as instructed, plugged it in and it once again appeared in the bios.
Booted up windows and ran EaseUS, it found the drive but at only 128GB. I ran the recovery procedure anyway, fourty hours later it finally completed but unfortunately it didn’t recover anything.
So interesting to see that the freezing might of helped, but again it was a last resort. Thanks to everyone for their help though, really appreciate all your input.
Did you at least create a disk image? Some times you need multiple passes at different layers. That is when a disk image comes in as it is non-destructive.
If you are looking for just storage, the BX line is the way to go. If you are looking for performance and better capacity the MX500 is the new hotness. I have two of these. They are much better than my MX200 and MX300 as they offer the Capacity of the MX200 and the Speed of the MX100. The MX300 is mostly an over clocked BX SSD minus the storage.
Sorry for taking ages to reply. When I first tried to make a disk image all I got was a file of a few kilobytes if I remember rightly, I think I tried again and after a fair few hours I got a notification that I didn’t have enough space on a 1TB drive to make an image or a clone.
I’ve burnt pretty much anything I really don’t want to lose onto disc, other than that I’ve saved other stuff to online storage. Thankfully most things were saved there as I did it out of habit more than anything, will become more of an obsession now.
Thanks for the advice on Crucial SSDs, I’ll bare that all in mind if and when I shop for one. I realised I don’t really need that much space, what was taking up space was films I never watch and music I can stream.
Couple years ago I had exactly the same symptoms and some others.
What I learned from that experiences:
If BIOS don’t detect it, go straight to professional data recovery service if you really need your data.
If you chose to software recovery tools route, from my experience, best result I got is, download several recovery image tools, put them in flash disk, put your broken and destination recovery hard drives in your pc, boot it, run it, let recovery software do its things, and wait for a day (most of my case). You might want to run several times with same tools or others.
Don’t, I repeat, DO NOT, try those things: slap the hard drive, punch it, freeze it, let it fall from certain height, shake it, etc, etc. These are not last resort attempt, go to professional.
(I did watch the videos on why not to do this, I was more worried about water shorting out the whole system). Waited a few minutes as instructed, plugged it in and 
it once again appeared in the bios.