Most recovery specialists actually the first thing they do is to identify the problem:
If the problem is Electrical Failure,Mechanical Failure,Bad Platter Area(bad sectors) and so on.

So according to the situation we act accordingly

if its Mechanical problem like the read-write head and motors, Clicking, grinding sounds you cant do cloning and the only thing you are doing by trying to clone the disk is more damage.

If its electrical problem is something with the PCB.

I assume that on this case the problem has to do with bad sectors and cant access the hard disk at all.
Well cloning the hard disk is one solution but is a 2TB Hard disk and maybe the information he wants to retrieve are some GB so cloning at the end maybe is a waste of time especially on hard disks with a lot of bad sectors , sometimes it may take ages to clone the disk.

My solution is simple, well actually I would point him to some tools to use but since are a bit expensive I would point him to some other alternative locations *cough* to download these tools which I cannot post here so as to access the disk and get the data...

Quoting: wolfyrionMost recovery specialists actually the first thing they do is to identify the problem:
If the problem is Electrical Failure,Mechanical Failure,Bad Platter Area(bad sectors) and so on.

So according to the situation we act accordingly

if its Mechanical problem like the read-write head and motors, Clicking, grinding sounds you cant do cloning and the only thing you are doing by trying to clone the disk is more damage.

If its electrical problem is something with the PCB.

I assume that on this case the problem has to do with bad sectors and cant access the hard disk at all.
Well cloning the hard disk is one solution but is a 2TB Hard disk and maybe the information he wants to retrieve are some GB so cloning at the end maybe is a waste of time especially on hard disks with a lot of bad sectors , sometimes it may take ages to clone the disk.

My solution is simple, well actually I would point him to some tools to use but since are a bit expensive I would point him to some other alternative locations *cough* to download these tools which I cannot post here so as to access the disk and get the data...

Well.
I am originally from an East European country.
Just drop some names