Whats some good options to backup my files? Trying to copy the files directly from the HDD doesnt work, the transfer just stalls. So is cloning the drive the way to go?
The most recommended tools for that are ddrescue and HDDSuperClone. Both are on the HDDLiveCD, a custom-made Lubuntu distribution proposed by the author of HDDSuperClone :
http://www.sdcomputingservice.com/hddlivecdHe's a member here under the nickname “maximus”, and may provide some guidance if he happens to see this thread, or if you summon him with a whispered prayer...
As has been said above, there's a risk involved, attempting a recovery by yourself could result in further damaging the drive and reducing the chances of successful recovery if you end up bringing it to a professional lab after all, but if you're lucky and careful you could recover upward of 95% with this method.
Does cloning require the same size of drive? The bad drive is 500 gb. I only have a 320gb drive to backup to?
Depends if it's almost full or has a lot of free space. With ddrescue, you can create an image file (instead of a direct clone) in “sparse” mode, which will save a lot of space as it only allocates non-empty sectors, so if there are only 200GB worth of files on the drive, the image will appear as 500GB but its actual allocated size will be 200GB, in this case the 320GB drive may suffice (although a 500GB drive is quite cheap nowadays... even if money is an issue you could find a used one for ~$20 – be sure to ask a SMART report before buying). HDDSuperClone probably has a similar option.
Is there a way to only backup the files/folders I want?
Almost impossible with free tools. Some programming wizards may be able to design clever scripts, and I used myself a
dirty method once to do this for just a few files, but if all this is new to you, you'll be lucky if you manage to get it done with the basic method.
There's a tool – also designed by “maximus” from what I understood – called ddru_ntfsbitmap, contained in a package called ddr_utilities, which, in combination with ddrescue, allows to :
– extract the MFT first (very important system file which contains all the metadata from files / folders : names, timestamps, allocated sectors...)
– extract the allocated sectors only, based on the Bitmap (another system file which indicates which sectors are in use or not).
The first feature is always useful (if a chunk of the MFT is located at the very end of the drive, and the drive fails completely before reaching that area, a major amount of recovered data is likely to be undecipherable, especially if there's a high degree of fragmentation). The second feature helps in reducing the size of the image, as well as avoiding to stress the drive to extract deleted files. The operation is very quick.