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I have 500gb external hdd that I cut and pasted all of my important files to in order to swap out my internal drive. I cut and pasted so that I could keep track and be sure that I moved everything. After everything was moved a check disk started and was interupted causing me to have corrupted files and the partitions had space conflicts. So I ran check disk again and it seemed to straighten things out and put some files into a "found" folder. I can view the folders and the files inside but many are corrupted. I have ran testdisk a few times and it has not been able to do the quick search , quickly. Sometimes the info will appear in a few seconds and a then again it has started a scan that shows lots of errors.I have done some reading here but I am unsure of what to do next. I will post some screen shots so you can see what I have.

Is it necessary to clone the drive or can I run ddrescue to put it onto another external drive?
Thanks to all of that help on this forum , you are truly life savers

I copied a small folder using test disk to another drive. The transfer was very slow. When I went back a few screens in testdisk to try and copy another, the file structure and partition were not visible. If I turn off the drive and wait a few hours it is visible again. Is this something I can continue to do? Copying small files and shutting off or am I risking the entire drive?

Working on a bad disk is always a risk.
You can use dd or ddrecue, on windows I've used hdd raw copy tool and it was very fast too:
http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/
Keep an eye on your source and destination disk!
Chkdsk can modify files and file system.
Especially your folder found000.
Might be possible that it already contains some chk files.
Info:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/how-to-reco ... -scandisk/

Please stress your disk as little as possible!
It's probably a case for datarecovery labor?

Fiona

Well I was scared enough by your statement to stress the disk as little as possible to ship the hd off to some pro's. I will play around with it when the info is recovered to learn something other than backup everything twice and recovery is expensive. Thank you for your reply Fiona