Backstory: a friend dropped my laptop pretty hard from about 4 feet. This damaged the hard drive. I've dealt with a few damaged hard drives and I can easily identify the clicks when there is a hardware failure inside the drive. However I think I hit the ironic jackpot this time as it sounds like the drive is still spinning perfectly fine. It even booted up Windows after the big drop, just super super slow. From my experience, all of this indicates a scratched drive, which should be somewhat recoverable..
So I bought a drive docking station and hooked it up, but when I plug in the drive it slows Recuva down to the point of being unusable. Recuva got stuck at 20%, first saying 2 hours, then 3, then 4 up to 8. I tried to press cancel at this point to mess with some of the settings, and it was acting like a program that couldn't respond. I can use Chrome perfectly fine, too, but if I try doing so much as watching a video(from the drive running my operating system of course) it gets extremely slow, and then as soon as I turn off this docking station - like literally .1 seconds after everything loads and Recuva will cancel.
This forum would know better than I, but I was thinking that Windows might be stuck reading the drive at a point it can't get past due to the scratch. What's the best option for me here? Windows keeps asking me I should reformat this drive, I was wondering if this would actually make it easier for Recuva to work?
I'm running 7 x64 16gb and recovering a 750gb WD on a Plugable dock