cgsecurity.org

Aye, drive definitely is deteriorating, TD has been picking up all three partitions with a quick search, but last time needed a deep search to find the third. You’re dead right, it’s time to call in the pros, I’ve been quoted £290 on a no recovery-no fee basis (+media to put it on if I can’t provide my own), which seems pretty reasonable? Will consult with the drive’s owner (my daughter) and take it from there.
Thanks again for all your help

You could ask on that forum, but yes, that fee seems vewy weasonable to me, if it's a legitimate bona fide data recovery company, and if it's for a full fledged service including the replacement of the head stack assembly in a dust free environment (which it vewy pwobably is). You could ask there if someone knows them and if they have a good rep, for peace of mind.

Seaitch wrote: 17 Sep 2020, 14:06 Hi,
Many thanks for quick reply, I was aware of limitations of FAT32, partition was formatted NTFS, to match the dying disk.

There is no need to match.

I thought it might have something to do with block size, but fsinfo shows 512 bytes/sector and 4096 bytes/physical sector which looks right. Is it essential to write the partition table to disk before imaging?

Are you imaging from disk to disk or from disk into a file?
If you are duplicating a disk everything from the source is in there, including partition information.
Therefore I don't understand what you mean by "write the partition table to disk before imaging".

I'm reluctant to do any writes given its parlous state. Incidentally, W10 wouldn't let me shrink the original single partition to make space for image

You do not write onto your faulty source. Shrinking your partition on the faulty source is a complicated write operation. Duplicating onto another drive involves just reading on the faulty source.
Storing the duplicate of a disk on the faulty source instead of another healthy target disc drive does not give any improvement.

Are you imaging from disk to disk or from disk into a file?

O.P. talked about “creating an image”, it's pretty clear that it wasn't a cloning operation.
Then “write the partition table to disk” could be what TestDisk was proposing to do.

You do not write onto your faulty source. Shrinking your partition on the faulty source is a complicated write operation. Duplicating onto another drive involves just reading on the faulty source.
Storing the duplicate of a disk on the faulty source instead of another healthy target disc drive does not give any improvement.

All the above might be sound advice in general, but here the O.P. most likely meant : trying to resize the partition on the target HDD in the hope of fixing the titular “not enough space” issue.

But apparently the drive's condition deteriorated to the point of making all those considerations moot by now.

Yeah, it was target drive I was referring to, and ‘twas the TestDisk option to write partition table that made me wonder if it was necessary.
The company that I got quote from is https://apextechnology.co.uk/
Credentials look good and Howard, the Director, has answered my emails promptly and courteously. Plus company is local to me so no postage costs. Just awaiting my daughter’s decision.
As for replacing head stack, I assume that is a physical repair? Fee is for data recovery only, I have a cunning plan for the drive when I have the data safe - involving the largest hammer I can find!
Cheers