✅ Marking this thread as Solved, awesome job, @bibi
You absolutely did the right thing by creating a disk image first. When you're dealing with a potentially unstable hard drive, imaging it before scanning is one of the safest and smartest moves you can make.
The guide @bibi followed (thanks for sharing that!) was written for external hard drives, but in this case, since OP's failing drive was a separate internal one, the same steps applied.
For anyone else landing here, I recommend checking out our broader guides:
It covers everything from soft failures to deeply corrupted drives, and goes over a lot of methods and tools that didn’t come up in this thread (TestDisk, for example). So definitely worth checking out.
Thanks to everyone who jumped in with help. Solid thread all around.