Have damaged external hard drive. Is there a way to recover the files

Before trying any type of recovery, it is important to check the health of the drive. If the drive is physically failing, then recovery options are much more limited since most apps are unable to deal with the errors thrown by the failing drive which in turn makes the failure even worse. Even macOS gets in the way and is not a good OS to use for attempting data recovery from a failing drive. You may only get one chance, so choose wisely.

You can attempt to check the health of the drive by running DriveDx (free trial period) and posting the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar. You will need to install a special USB driver in order to attempt access to the health information on the external drive.

The health of the drive will dictate your possible options. If the drive is healthy, then using a data recovery app is fine. There are many choices, but many seem to like Disk Drill or Stellar Data Recovery.

If the drive is not healthy, how bad the failure is will determine if you can try to transfer some files from it or whether you should contact a professional data recovery service.

gotthard48 wrote:

Files were on an iMAC . the Ext hard drive was damaged or crashed. Can I recover them? HD was a Seagate 2 TB device. OS on the iMac was 14.4.1

What kind of files are on the 2T Seagate external drive?

Are the files from your current iMac or another iMac?

Need help to offload files from damaged external hard drive which can't be hooked up to my IMAC. ANYRecover says it can do it, but isn't something I can download from Apple Store.

What happens when you try and connect the 2T Seagate external drive to your iMac?

Data Recovery software will not help, if you can not connect to the Seagate drive.

Sounds like what you need, is a professional data recovery service.

see > mac data recovery services near me

Why not use your Time Machine backup?