help getting images off of a FAILING hard drive

[astromoose]

This is a laptop HD in a dell latitude D610.
It is a friends machine and I am trying to help him out. He has about 20 gigs worth of years of photos on this thing, with NO backups!

EDIT: running windows XP, NTFS file system. 80gig toshiba drive. I wish i could pull this drive out and hook it up to another computer!

Apparently data access started getting really slow, then the machine started blue screening. Now it won't even start booting.

I booted the machine off of a bartPE CD to try and copy the files to an external USB drive. It would copy a few images out of any given folder and then stall and come up with "cyclic redundancy error".
I tried using "getdataback" by runtime software and it would only stall.

I managed to get "easyrecovery 6 pro" by ontrack software to copy the files, but 4/5s of them won't open as images on another machine even though the files are there. can you think of anyway to reconstruct these?

I tried to make an image of the drive to try and recover from there, but acronis trueimage and drivesnapshot just stall out.

The weird thing is that in the bartPE environment it will let me copy a few files, then stall out on a few of them because of what i assume are bad sectors, only to let me copy more files further down the folder. is there some program that will just copy what images are intact and leave what is unreadable (in lieu of attempting to drag over one, out of 10000, files at a time)??

any other solutions or programs to recommend?

thanks for any help!

 

[RebateMonger]

You can try using Microsoft's free RoboCopy software to do the copying. It'll try a file and if there's a bad sector, you can (with command line options) tell it NOT to retry bad sectors and to go on to the next file. I haven't played with add-ins for BARTPE, so I don't know how you add RoboCopy (a DOS program) to it.