Recommendations sought for salvaging hard drives

[Sour Mash]

That's interesting, when I run out of luck I'll take one apart. So far I'm doing OK with 2 useable drives out of three I've worked on - there's stuff on this current one I didn't know I had, lots of iot so I am now searching for places to put it! Also found I didn't have any suitable cables to plug these things into the tower case I have, so waiting on Amazon now

[Yellow Pasque]

The next one is an unknown, a Western Digital 1TB drive. This one is pretty much dead I think.

As oldfred asked, does it show up in the BIOS/EFI?

[Sour Mash]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean?

[TheFu]

If you only have bare HDDs, you can get a USB3 "dock" for about $20-$30 that lets us drop a SATA HDD into a slot and will be seen like any other USB3 HDD. When done, power off the dock and pull the HDD out, then drop in another. Infinite storage via a single, cheap, dock. I have 1 dual-dock and 2 single docks (3 computers). The Dual-dock can clone a HDD from slot A --> B without any computer connected.

Of course, having HDDs internal will be faster since the SATA protocol is more complete than the USB_storage protocol. For data recovery needs, SATA connectivity is important, but they do make eSATA+USB3 docks. Of course, you'll need a proper eSATA external port. A case 2-4 plug converter that connects each eSATA plug to interior SATA plugs (1 for 1) is $9. If the dock is dual, you'll need a special eSATA-pm (port multiplier) card. Those are about $40, but only specific models work with Linux.

[mIk3_08]

You can also try hdd/ssd sata disk enclosure if you have one. It might help. But you must need to know that the drive shows up in BIOS.

[Yellow Pasque]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean?

Go into your BIOS/EFI/System Setup. You need to hit a key (often 'Del') when the system starts. Read your mobo/system manual if the POST screen doesn't tell you.
Does the hard disk register as a bootable option?

[Sour Mash]

If you only have bare HDDs, you can get a USB3 "dock" for about $20-$30 that lets us drop a SATA HDD into a slot and will be seen like any other USB3 HDD. When done, power off the dock and pull the HDD out, then drop in another. Infinite storage via a single, cheap, dock. I have 1 dual-dock and 2 single docks (3 computers). The Dual-dock can clone a HDD from slot A --> B without any computer connected.

I've got one of those that I've been using, it seems to be the way forward as I can easily swap out drives. It seems to accept most drives, I bought it a while back when I had to clone some laptops, made life easier.

It didn't come with any instructions and has a big red button on the front, I so want to press it!

[Sour Mash]

Progress so far, all the drives are alive, even the one i thought was dead came to life and is working! Now the data salvaging is proving tricky. I've put the fullest drive in one of my machines and connected it to the motherboard but it gave me all sorts of issues when I booted the machine. Turns out there was a boot flag on a small partition on it. Now fixed but it's slow progress salvaging the files - I get a lot of recompiling errors - what I'm doing is copying the data off the old drives, onto a new drive so I can then format the old one and run a deep scan/repair - fsck and badblocks.
So, all i'm doing at the moment is to 'move to' the new drive but is there a better/faster way? I want something that will move what it can and automatically skip over what what it can's leaving me the troublesome (probably damaged) files so I can figure out what to do with them (most may be replaceable). Mos of this stuff is music, video and picture files.

[Sour Mash]

Well I'm quite amazed, after a few days of messing about, all these drives seem to be working, yes they have the odd bad segment and yes the one that fell down the stairs looks like it's been through the wars but they all seem to have held their own. I did have trouble with permissions on them but now I've figured out how to fix that I can get at the files on them.
I am having some trouble scraping the data off one of them, lots of errors when I try and move files from it onto another known good drive. The errors seem to mainly be the nonsensical "cannot move as directory not empty" and something about files being too big to reassemble - I'm just skipping through them and will see what's left over once I've moved the bulk - will try and capture the exact error messages and post later.
Two of teh drives are now on my Windows machine to serve movies - I may try and make some sort of movie file server with this old machine, might be a good use for all this storage!

[Sour Mash]

I get "error splicing file:Input/output error"