i need to recover my data from my portable hard drive that says it needs to be formatted before i can use it.
the software needs to be free, not just a trial becaause i do not have much money

thanks

I am recent grad looking for a job. That means I need the laptop badly and don’t have much money to fix it. The hard disk, started giving off some really loud noises in the morning and by afternoon, BIOS wasn’t even detecting it. I am not sure how long it would take to fix this and how much a new one would cost. Same about data recovery too. Any suggestions or advice on this would be greatly appreciated.