Lots of fail; tried to create system image from failing HDD

After seeing the "hard drive error" message fropm Windows and establishing that te hard drive was in fact failing, I attempted to create a system image of the drive to restore it. I freed up some space on my external drive and started the process, but had to leave; I was told that there were error messages, but she couldn't say for certain what they were. I'm thinking write error messages. Anyway I attempted to restore the image but couldn't get the laptop to see the image, or even the drive, so I plugged it into my other laptop and a computer at work. This drive is no longer being recognised anywhere (device manager, disk management). What can I do?

Hi,

Welcome!

Am I correct that you are trying to make a backup of a failing or failed hard drive? Personally, I suggest not.

Instead, remove the drive, and put it in a USB or other external enclosure and access the externally mounted bad drive from a healthy PC. Copy off the files that you need to recover (/users... etc.).

I recommend looking at scootersoftware. I like the BeyondCompare utility because it will allow you to copy, compare, and log failed file copies without interruption. I don't like other utilities which error and pause or error and stop when failing to copy a file. BeyondCompare will "keep going" and report the failures for your later inspection. When finished, you have a comparison of source and target directories and will know what failed to copy across.

Just a suggestion.

I had already done that, but this laptop had some rather expensive software on it and the owner didn't have the installation disks. The problem now is that I can't access my external drive, which is where I saved the data, as well as the image.

Removed the drive from its enclosure today and plugged it into a black box, and disk management recognized it as drive e; however it was grayed out and said "no media." I also inspected the enclosure and found that the USB connector was loose. I guess my ex dropped it while it was connected and the cord put enough stress on it to break the solder joints. So why then was it listed as "no media?" Could it be because of the image of her defective drive on there?

Because she doesn't know any better. And because I broke her laptop...was printing something for her and dropped it while moving it. It started developing errors soon after. She does back her files up, but not her system. In any case I feel responsible.

I already have a new drive, do you mean the external drive is no good? A friend told me to connect it to a Mac, see if that will read it. This isn't my backup drive, but all of my movies are on here.

At this point I only want to try to recover my external drive and try to figure out how to get Windows installed on her new HDD.