Unsure how to save failing hard drive

[Curto]

So I have a 1tb hitachi hdd that is used to store my documents and music, I had a message pop up saying this harddrive is failing and that i should start back up as soon as possible. I have tried chkdsk through cmd and through the windows start menu but it says I need to dismount the drive before this could happen. I select yes and nothing happens.
Then yesterday my screen went blue and flashed a message along the lines of windows needs to shut down then my pc shut down. Im really not sure I want to turn it back on now at risk of losing the files on my drive which are very important to me.
I should also mention this drive was used for my operating system before I did a fresh install on a new ssd i have. Im not sure if the old windows files may be causing problems because i didnt really bother clearing them.

Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks

 

[James Mason]

You can't save a failing hard drive.
Get a new working hard drive, install it, and transfer what files you can to it and then remove the old hard drive from the system and drive a nail or two through it to make any private data unrecoverable/stealable.