When it comes to IO failures my experiences have been six of one, half a dozen of another when it comes to Windows vs Linux for recovering files from a NTFS formatted drive. Basically also try a Windows live CD (bartpe if you have it, a version of it comes with Hiren's boot CD and would be the main reason I do not link said boot CD now) and also try a Linux one.
The best way would be if you had a fancy hard drive read/clone tool as they can cut through a lot, they cost an awful lot though. You could try an actual hard drive image/clone (whether you want something like Clonezilla or something more computer fixing focused I leave to you to decide) and then load that as some kind of virtual drive.
On very rare occasions (mainly back in the internally it was sata but they still presented IDE for late IBM/early lenovo days and dell from around a similar era) I have seen the hard drive controller/power rail inside the laptop fail and cause IO errors and on even rarer occasions I have seen the hard drive circuit board/pins have some failure/corrosion that causes this. To that end inspect the PCB -- if you can otherwise solder then you can probably spot the main/common faults. Also get a caddy or a different laptop and stick it in that instead -- doing it in hardware is fine for a corrupt registry or something but if you are brushing up against such faults then best to remove the possibilities.
In the modern world I do not particularly rate
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm or anything like it, if you are fixing some ancient 486 through p2 (and if recovering someone's photos makes you a friend then fixing someone's machine that might be underpinning their business will do better still and I still find stuff like that in businesses/industry) then it is well worth a look.
Beyond this you get into the world of big boy data recovery and that is a strange world indeed, and I say that knowing what we do around here/having looking a mirror.
Hard drive recovery is an object lesson computer fixing triage though, especially if you are doing it as some kind of business -- you might be able to spend 50 hours and piece things back together byte by byte but most would rather not have false hope and just let the mourning commence.