Just a pro tip, never do a data recovery on a defective drive.
Use software to create an image file on the drive, and do your recovery from that drive.
A known good drive, with a good image of a failed / dying drive is going to net you much more data than a drive dying from a hardware issue, in the middle of you doing a data recovery.
Honestly, the problem you described, is a hardware failure, while running the program... system unresponsive, etc... all due to the drive pooping the bed in the middle of a recovery.
@Charles
Just a pro tip too.
This cracked exe File is pure garbage.
After testing on 4 different Hardware, (2 Laptops and 2 desktop-PC?s from different manufacturers) it broke down on all these 4 computers for some unknown reason.
Let me tell you that all my hard disks are working fine. I'm doing IT since 25 years and it's definitely because of this failed cracked file (recorverit.exe including its abortion "cefwebview.exe", which opens 5 times in a row and destroys the whole thing
So as you can see, the user "thecreater" is not alone in this, and two of my personal friends have exactly the same problem on their hardware, with this tool.
It surprises me that nobody of you has the idea to ask why it crashes. Did anyone ever have the idea to test the tool without the cracked exe, because then you would have seen that the tool works fine and doesn't trigger a bumbling "cefwebview.exe" that messes everything up.
Unfortunately this tool does not have a save function for the scan results, which is a pity and incomprehensible for my taste.
I say it again in conclusion. The cracked file is the evil, not our hard drives.