With prior HD failures I've had great success replacing the HD with a Samsung SSD which includes cloning software that has worked perfectly each time.  They are around $50 these days for a 500GB drive.  Assuming it's hardware failure, data is usually unscathed & it leaves you like nothing ever happened.  YMMV.

Maybe I could try a plug and play type USB to SATA option

Wondershare Recoverit will read the entire drive for recognizable files and enable you to offload them to another drive.

I've just done that on my sister in law's machine...that was likely spiked...as the MoBo is toast and the drive was RAW.

It's not entirely silly to spend the money on the proggy...as it actually works...

Forbes reviewed the various utilities for recovery...fwiw, a recommendation fro someone who knows and has used the software (like Jafo) is something to consider strongly.

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/best-data-recovery-software/

Anthony...I pulled the drive out of the machine as the box was dead...and attached it by USB and external power supply...so the process was slow...but data was recovered to an existing internal drive on my machine....then I went through it folder by folder...dumping all the system stuff eg Windows, and only keept the 'User' stuff...email, photos, docs etc...got about 15gig ...onto a 16gig USB stick to be transferred to the new computer when she gets it...

Thanks to all for the info and help. I'm thinking I will try to see if the computer can read from a plug and play hard drive enclosure before anything else... if it can somehow read the drive, I can then get the data I need off it, or if not, maybe I can still have other options. The good news is I already found my lossless music library on another back up hard drive that I had stored and was already able to restore that, so that's a huge relief.

If Windows shows the drive as 'there' but not formatted and allegedly empty [RAW] Wondershare will get the data.  Not all of it as some will show up as 'unknown.jpg' or similar meaning part of the file descriptor is lost.  Mine was an 'only' drive...so the OS was on it...and toast, but the User data was still there...and that was all I was after...

Yes...you won't be able to boot if the MBR is corrupted and it'll read as 'empty' - no sign of anything on the drive.

If you're running 'Recoverit' it'll list the drives for you to choose and it'll start scanning....can take hours though...

No, I'm saying Recoverit does work.  It has recovered files from 2 drives for me so far in the past few months.  1 was a 2TB SSD I buggered up somehow...and even as a non-boot drive it was messing up my system causing File manager lockups...but attached via external USB I got the data off...then did a full format...saving the drive.

The other one was just last week...sister in law's sole drive....couldn't boot as MoBo was also fried... but got data off and reformatted OK.

200% success rate so far, but as I said...drive must be at least 'seen' by the OS but even if it says 'unformatted' or 'RAW' the data can be copied off it ....and after that you can bin it...or reformat...

Thanks a lot Jafo... I'll try to do what you said and see if I can salvage anything out of there. When its over I will post how it turned out.

So it seems to be going well initially. It scanned a bunch of stuff quick and then continued with a deep scan which has been going about 5 hours and is about 68% complete. I figured I would wait for the deep scan to finalize before trying the recovery part. It definitely looks promising.

If you end up with corrupt/damaged files, don't just chuck it. This link might be of help: 

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/best-tools-repair-corrupted-damaged-files-windows/

At 77% it has slowed to a trickle. I was hoping it would speed back up, but it hasn't. I keep thinking maybe I should start recovering what it has, but it hasn't completely stopped deep scanning yet, so I figured I would wait until it says its done.