Failing non-system hard drive

[Wingnut225]

Hello,
I have Win 7 installed on an SSD and all other programs and data stored on a separate Hitachi HDD. The Hitachi is starting to fail with over 2,000 bad sectors. I'm trying to figure out the best way to get the info off the failing drive and onto the new one. I should mention that I have my entire PC backed up to an HP Mediasmart server in addition to an external hard drive so I have two backups of everything. The server will restore data to a specific drive. So I can select the drive letter that is failing and hit restore from the server. I've never had to do it before so I'm not sure exactly how it works. In my situation, is it best to try the server restore to a new drive or do I need to use a cloning software?

 

[jumanji]

You should immediately retire the failing Hitachi drive before it gets worse and save it for cloning if needed ..

Put a new drive in its place and restore from the backup server/ or any other backup source you have..

In case you are unable to restore for whatever reason or such restore fails or there is some deficiency in the restored data ( like some data hadn't been backed up), then as a final recourse you may clone the bad drive with ddrescue and see whether you can make it up.

Just a while ago I finished another post on how to clone using ddrescue. Keep it bookmarked in case you have to resort to cloning.
http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware...t-clone-failing-hard-drive-3.html#post3148147

In case the Hitachi drive is a GPT initialised drive you should clone it to an image rather than a sector to sector cloning and then recover data from the image.