Direct access to unmounted disks

[Mark]

Are there any good utilities for doing i/o directly to disks that are not
mounted, possibly not properly formatted?

I recently had a friend's computer die and when I initially tried to access
the files on the primary hared drive, it reported back as not being
formatted (which I knew was not the case).  In another setting I was able to
mount and read the disk, but I was wondering what we do when that can't be
done - what utility/ies do we use to recover disks that won't mount?

By "good utilities" I mean those that are relatively easy to use in order to
read and possibly write a raw disk sector.  dd doesn't really qualify as
"easy to use" but it would suffice in a pinch.

Thanks.

Mark
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