If I set it up in an external usb case and connect it, drive runs, no nasty noises. virtual disk management sees the drive,- raw, healthy partition. Then, in a few minutes , a reconnect of virtual disk management will no longer start, no matter how long I wait. Explorer sees drive but there is no progress bar to the right of the drive letter, and left click on mouse shows "file or directory is corrupted or unreadable". Right click shows hourglass forever.

Tried to save data with easeus data recovery. Quick scan showed plausible results--- lots of images, documents, etc. as it should have done, but deep scan makes it about 20% of the way through and locks up. Drive pretty warm -- set up fan to cool, but no joy.

About 2 years of photos in there -- at age 80, quite worried.