Repair and recovery are two different trades. Repair makes a machine work again — software reinstalled, parts replaced, a failing drive swapped out. Recovery treats the drive itself as the job, and it needs a certified clean room, precision-matched donor parts, firmware and service-area tooling, and imaging hardware built for the purpose.

The two don’t overlap, and the tools of one destroy the cases of the other. Recovery software run on a physically failing drive forces hours of continuous reading across bad sectors, with no head map and no way to work around the damaged areas and target the critical data, on a drive that may have minutes left. Reinstalling an operating system overwrites the area your files occupy. Powering a clicking drive on repeatedly to see whether it comes up this time puts the heads back on the platter each attempt. None of that is a mistake in repair terms. It is standard practice, and it ends recoveries permanently.

So a physically failed drive should not go on a repair bench at all. Clicking, grinding, dropped and beeping, liquid, or no longer detected — at that point the correct next step is to stop, not to try one more thing. Every attempt after the failure spends part of what’s left, and nothing spent that way comes back.

If a drive like that has already been handed over somewhere, ask two questions before you agree to anything. What has been done to it so far — how many power cycles, whether any software was run, whether it was opened. And where does it go from here: a street address, and the name of the person who opens it. A drive that was left alone is a different job from one that has been tried repeatedly, and knowing which we’re starting from is worth more than any other single thing you can tell us.