Help with cloning a failing hard drive

[TomKenda1l]

Hi

I have had this hard drive for nearly 3 years and recently it has been showing some signs of failing, such as sluggish performance and more recently a registry error BSOD if I leave it idle for more than about 5 mins. However today when I booted it up, it made loud clicking sounds which I know is another sign of failure so I turned it off. I'm going to buy another hard drive for next day delivery however I'm not sure how to go about moving the data. There's about 700gb of crap on the failing one, so should I install cloning software and clone it onto the new drive, or will the errors pass over onto the new drive? I have an external 1tb drive, however it's half full. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[ArtPog]

Since you have 700 GB of "crap" on the (apparently) failing drive, why don't you just delete as much as that "crap" as possible, so that you could bring down the total volume of contents that could be accommodated by your 1 TB external drive?

Then clone the "non-crap" data contents to the USBEHD.

Naturally you've tested that "failing" HDD with a diagnostic program to determine the health of the disk, right?

In any event, if the OS + remaining data on the "failing" HDD appear problem-free, then you can go ahead with the disk-cloning operation when you get your new drive. Just remember the old saying, "If you clone garbage, garbage is what you get". Capiche?

 

[TomKenda1l]

Ok thanks

 

[RolandJS]

"...Then clone the "non-crap" data contents to the USBEHD..."
Or, simply copy the data folders and files onto external media.
However, the clicking noise may indicate too late for DIY data recovery.