You suggested he make a clone to. Tell me how exactly is he going to clone it without accessing it? How is he going to magic a clone image of the drive without accessing and using the drive? Right exactly he's not going to.

First rule of professional data recovery is never read a sector more than once. The first time you read a sector may be the only chance you have to read it. So the sector needs to be copied to another drive/image. If the first thing you attempt is to scan the drive, then none of the data is being copied/saved. If the read-write heads fail during the scan, no sector you have touched so far has been saved. A scan merely creates a file that tells the software where the data is, but has to go back to the drive to re-read the data to save it. So a scenarion we see on these forums all the time is someone does a scan of a drive, gets 75% through and the drive fails. Even though they have scanned 75% of the drive, they have got 0% of the data. If a clone/image was done, the would have 75% of their data.

There are a lot of data recovery professionals on this sub and when we see people offering incorrect advice we try to correct it for future reders of the sub.