Title says all. Does anyone know of a safe way to retrieve data off my HGST (besides sending the drive to some of you guys and spending a fortune for recovery)? Merely copy-pasting files from it to a safe location isn't going to cut it, as I'd risk ending up with even more bad sectors.

You're not referring to Data Rescue PC, are you? I could try ddrescue, but the contents of the drive are simply too huge and I'm not sure as to where can I borrow a drive for me to store an image and recover from it.

in any case,you will need new drive. So why would you borrow drive?

So I could shove in some of my files into it as a drive image for the time being and take those that I need from the said image.

You need to have a rethink. A drive image as a file is going to be about the same size as the source imaged drive. Unless of course you have a compressed image which I wouldn't recommend. So you are going to need a good drive of the same or larger size to copy to!

Figures. The best bet as you said would be a bit-to-bit copy of whatever it is that's on my drive; it's that I don't have enough room at the moment.

I totally agree with Spildit and would also highly recommand not going to the computer shop, but to ask a data recovery professionnal.

Nowadays, a second hand 1 TB hard drive should cost you ~25-40$, and maybe even less in Philippines.

If you need to save most important files quicker than others, or just a few files, you may consider a smaller drive and the xcopy command that you can run from a DOS console as Administrator. However, be aware that this is not as secure as cloning the drive with ddrescue or else.

If the drive has many bad sectors making cloning very slow, mastering ddrescue for better recovery speed is something that requires quite a lot of experience with drives in poor conditions.

Data recovery companies already have the equipement for good transfer rates, data recovery softwares and the experience that you cannot replace. At the end, it could be cheaper (and much more secure) than trying yourself.

Yeah, I only needed to salvage a bunch of documents off my drive; I can live without getting my games folder as I can just reinstall it anyway, plus cloning the whole drive would take a loooooong time and a lotta space.