Hard drive about to die

[COKEDUDEUSF]

I have a hard drive that is about to die. It is the hard drive for my OS. It has given me 7 good years so I think I got my moneys worth. I obviously want to get my data off of it. So what is the best way to do this with hopefully as little strain as possible on it? Do I want to just load the OS then straight copy and paste to an external HD or a big flash drive? I have a couple of massive flash drives. I usually use my external HD's just trying to think of all my options. Do I want to load up a live cd and copy and paste that way so there is less OS strain on the HD? Use another computer to create an image? Is there some better option I am not thinking of? 

[Nokiamies]

You want to get most important data out first with minimal retries. If there is bad blocks Windows will halt copy process. Hook drive as secondary and use unstoppable filecopy (freeware). After you got all important data backed up, you can try cloning of disk.

[jaclaz]

You want (in theory):

1) an external connection, like a USB-SATA (or USB-IDE) adapter
2) to take the hard disk out of the PC case and connect it through the USB interface (a long normal SATA - or IDE -  cable might do, the point is about having the disk accessible in order to be able to put a hand on it and feel if it is warming too much) 
3) DO NOT use it as boot device
4) connect it to an already running system and use a program capable of doing (partial/in parts) dd-like copy[1] to an image
5) make sure that the disk is cool, either stop/suspend the copy if it heats up or have a fan capable of cooling it pointed to it (or both)

Now, in practice, you can forget the first four point and do whatever else instead, but the point #5 is important, do not over-stress the disk or let it warm up too much without proper cooling.

Generally speaking a backup is something that only works - maybe - for documents, a dd-like disk image contains the whole disk "as is", it takes much more space but it contains *everything*.

jaclaz

[1] under windows, datarescuedd:

https://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/v3/drdd.htm

or dmde:

https://dmde.com/