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I am immensely happy with the good news.
Yep, TestDisk has a deep learning curve. It is also highly interactive and one has to read each Window carefully. Since you had already run it and seemed to be familiar with it I didn't give you the link to my thread Regain a lost drive using Test Disk - An Illustrated Guide Well, I know that reading through it without missing some relevant information itself is quite a task :). You will definitely find the elusive P - copy files mentioned somewhere deep inside and also the link on how to copy files My external hard drive suddenly became unllocated:
Also read through my post #5 that leads you to a potential tool in AOMEI WinPE into which you can also include some portable tools of your choice. Including Bootice in it will enable reading/writing into your HDD sectors in situations where your normal Windows cannot access the drive or when one wants to manipulate the sectors on an unbootable Windows. That answers your question how to examine the sectors.
You may also read the following:
Lost partitions!
Since you raised the question on examining the sectors this post also should interest you Benefits of GPT vs MBR Primary and MBR Logical Partitions ?
I am giving you all this information since you have done a lot of work yourself dealing with this drive and these will help honing your skills further.
Now coming to the latest info you had provided that you hear the clicking sounds indicating a failing drive with bad sectors, you may try cloning the drive with ddrescue - which will repeatedly try reading the data in bad sectors - and then do the data recovery on the cloned drive. You may perhaps be able to get some of the corrupted files right. You can take recourse to this if some of the corrupted files are important to you since this will be a time consuming procedure.
Best method/tool for cloning a failing HDD for Data Recovery?
Have a good day.
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