Restore software that boots to itself

My wife's dell notebook hard drive crashed, a Toshiba MQ01ABF050 500mb
I have been unable to use any normal recovery tools in Windows
Is there recovery software that I can boot to and use bypassing everything else altogether?
I think the drive is recoverable but would like to do it myself if possible

The drive clicks when powered on and I get the windows 'ding-dong' found device sound
but either no drive ever shows up in windows explorer or an empty drive shows up

Does it show in the bios or disk manager if not its dead and no software will recover it

it does show in boot manager. I think it says 'raw' or needs to be initialized.
I ordered an exact working duplicate and swapped platters, but the same problem persists

If its raw then its lost the parition table and you need specific parition revovery software as once that is recovered all files will be there there are plenty of free ones on Google many with bootable disk

Try this excellent recovery disk on the forum.

Windows 10 Recovery Tools - Bootable Rescue Disk