datahoarder

Does windows call it "Android file system"? Because as far as I know, Android usually uses EXT4, which is also what many Linux systems use by default. But it could also be corrupted filesystem or dying drive.

Try booting into a Linux USB. Linux in general can in some cases be more forgiving with failing hard drives, whereas Explorer in Windows sometimes just freezes until it gets a response from the drive.

If you can't see and mount the filesystem (preferably as read-only), take a look at tools like ddrescue (better than plain old dd with dying drives) and testdisk (to recover data from corrupted partitions). The "proper" procedure is to make a full disk image (or as much as it can read) and then try to recover the data from that disk image, so the potentially failing drive is used as little as possible.

Try copying the image to another drive and see what you can find with something like ddrescue.

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.