>>3623520This. My 1st gen 1TB drive was originally external; eventually the port inside the housing came loose from the board so I rescued it and made it an internal drive. Now it's super old and slow (12 years and still going!), so I got it an external bay and it's still working, but gets to sleep and rest in-between uses. Sometimes it's just a silly issue that can be fixed with simple tools. If it's clicking, not responding, or constantly corrupting data then it may be a lost cause.
Some sectors could be recovered and the bad ones partitioned off as a "do not save data here" zone too. Try Hirens to access the disk via a Linux shell to poke around and see if you can recover files even if the drive is no longer usable for day-to-day.
