datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
view the rest of the comments
Sounds like it's on its last legs, especially if one of the partitions locked up file explorer to that degree. Too much messing with it could kill it for good.
Your best bet would be to do a low level backup of the whole drive using something like dd. That's a Linux utility, but I believe there are open source equivalents that you can run on Windows. You might see them called sector level backup tools. Basically, they don't care how fucked a drive is, they won't try to make any sense of it, they'll just copy it exactly to a .ISO file. Corruption and all. That should be the last time you actually plug the physical drive in.
Then make a copy of the ISO file to tinker with without risking losing any data. You can always go back to the original ISO copy if you fuck something up.
There are a ton of different tools you could use to attempt to recover data from that ISO, but the first step is to make sure you aren't trying to build your workbench on top of a time bomb.
Awesome thank you!