Safe to attach corrupted drive to linux pc?

[read error]

If I attach a suspected corrupted disk to a pc running linux, it would NOT attempt to repair or write anything to the drive behind my back, right?

I want to safely make a clone of the drive first, maybe using ddrescue, without any OS writing anything or attempting repair on it. I don't have a hardware write blocker so I want to be sure.

There's no hardware error or bad sector on this drive. I suspect it is corrupted at the NTFS level because windows 10 crashed in the middle of writing the drive.

It's a toshiba 2T drive. I looked at their web site and did not find any free disk cloning software, so I'm going to try ddrescue since it is free and is often mentioned in recovery forum.

 

[Jared]

Generally speaking, Linux won't automatically write anything to an attached non-Linux disk. But, there are a lot of custom builds out there so it could depend on what build you are using. Personally I use ParrotOS which is a forensics focused build which easily mounts Windows drives in read only mode.