500gb hdd turned raw, please help

[Danijel]

First of all i would like to say hi to all and thanks for this free software.
I have a 10 years old son and 6 years of photos on the drive that turned raw.
Things i can tell so far - disk is 500 gb single partition ntfs/gpt on Windows 10 x64.
Fix disk on windows startup hangs at stage 2, chkdsk f: /f hangs at stage 2.
In testdisk i can't do analyse because it hangs at check cylinder at 99%. Managed to enter in drive options and bot sector is "ok". First a time i tried to "list" it gave me the input /output error second time i managed to list all files and folders on drive, tried to copy one small folder with couple ple of files, copied files resulted same name but 0 kb.
What can i do?

[cgrenier]

It looks like there are bad sectors. You can try clone the disk to a new empty one using ddrescue as described in https://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk.pdf
Once it's done, remove the original disk and try to recover your data (chkdsk, testdisk...) from the clone.

Contacting a data recovery company may be safer as it's an hardware problem.

[Danijel]

I am running ddrescue from ubuntu. Estimated time 12 days. After 2 days i have 0 bad sectors and 0 bad areas but i have 3500 read errors. 80 gb recovered. Should i keep going another 10 days with so many errors or try something else?

[recuperation]

What is "trying something else"?

[Danijel]

I don't really know what, need to get photos back somehow.
Is it possible to mount partial immage from dd rescue or doci need to wait until is complete?

[recuperation]

Is it possible to mount partial immage from dd rescue

Yes. But I do not see any interest in your case.

[Danijel]

Update :
Cloning stoped with an error at 30% recovered, tried to restart few times and nothing. I turned of pc and i disconnected corrupted drive but i left destination disk attached, when i restarted pc windows performed "fix" on destination disk and when i logged in i had all all recovered files. I was so happy .
What will happen if i go back to ubuntu and try to squeeze some more files on backwards maybe? I guess that the immage changed after windows fix and i risk to overwrite files.

[recuperation]

What will happen if i go back to ubuntu and try to squeeze some more files on backwards maybe? I guess that the immage changed after windows fix and i risk to overwrite files.

You missed to copy your recovery hard drive before applying chkdsk.
Basically you simply destroyed your ability to continue your recovery process which is a bad thing given the high error rate on your failing hard drive.

If you had applied chkdsk on a second copy - which would have been produced very quickly compared to your recovery process - you would simple continue to extract more data from your failing drive.

Despite your success your case is a good example what not to do.