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Imaging a damaged hard drive
I'm looking for a way to image a windows installation from a machine whose drive I believe to be corrupted. The symptoms are slow, unresponsive windows explorer (file explorer won't launch, start menu search doesn't function). The disk light is always on, and it isn't usable in safe mode either. A chkdsk /f was stuck for almost a week and never completed successfully because I need to move onward.
My question is: how do I best recover all the installed programs or the system as it exists with the hard drive in this state? Is it possible? Will windows backup (if I can even open it) image bad sectors? I have a feeling the failing sectors of the drive contain critical windows files since basic navigation is almost a dead standstill.
Thanks in advance.