I don't know what your knowledge of disks and operating systems is. First thing, don't write anything to the malfunctioning disk. Recovery software can usually figure out what's wrong if the directory data hasn't been overwritten. Note, the following tools can all write data to a disk, so try to understand what the tool is trying to do.
Of Windows, I'm most familiar with Windows XP although it's been a few years. There is a GUI based disk utility in the administrative tools that can check and repair some of the basic faults on a drive.
Windows CHKDSK run in a DOS window can be useful. Try CHKDSK x: where x is the drive letter of the malfunctioning drive. CHKDSK will not write to the disk unless the /F option is used.
Testdisk (
https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk ) is a very good data recovery tool for Linux or Windows. It can recover files from disk images so, if possible, copy the malfunctioning disk's data to another disk and work on it there.
Linux's DDRESCUE is a most excellent way to make an image copy of a malfunctioning disk.
Cheers,