Rant: a dead drive on a Friday almost cost me a 9 year customer
A regular since 2017 called me at 4pm on a Friday saying Quicken would not open and her whole office was frozen, and I walked in to find the drive clicking with no backup anywhere. I pulled it, ran ddrescue for 5 hours on my bench in Fresno, and got 99 percent of her files back because the failure was in the boot sector and not the platters. What is your go to first move when a drive sounds like that, do you image it right away or try software first?