(dying) WD 3200KS - how to best transfer files?

[inflames988]

i have a WD 3200KS SE 16 drive (320gb, 7200rpm, 16mb cache) that is slowly but surely biting the dust. Anyways, i had them ship me a new one first so I could transfer the files before i send the old one back, but im having a bit of trouble transferring.

The drive causes my machine to come up with a BSOD referring to "nvata.sys", i know it's the drive because the BSOD only comes up if the drive is connected. Anyways, the drive is just about full (~300GB). i use it to store .ISO's of all my important discs (windows OS cd's, etc) since i couldnt bring all these CDs to college with me. So its full of 700mb and 4.7GB files that take a fair amount of time to transfer (since the drive is dying). Usually I can transfer two or three before the BSOD pops up on me, but it seems to be getting more and more frequent.

Do you guys think it would be better to keep trying to transfer these files in windows, or to try some type of ghosting program (like the one WD provides) and just try to copy the whole drive in one go? any other suggestions for trying to get files off a (dying) drive? one of my friends told me about a "Freezer trick" where you put the drive in some type of container in a freezer but i was skeptical (and thought it might make things worse). Thanks!

[EzyStvy]

Do you have an external case you can pop it in?

[inflames988]

yeah, this drive came from an enclosure (eSATA). the drive seemed like it was dying so i put it inside the pc as an internal drive and it seemed to work ok, so i thought the enclosure was dead. i tried another drive in the case and it doesnt seem to work either. so i think both the enclosure AND the drive are dead! im RMAing the enclosure soon though, so I should have another. i am trying a full partition copy now using WD data lifeguard tools. after a few hours its up to 73% complete and only popped up with one error. fingers crossed, hopefully it will copy most of the data.

[glc]

My standard procedure in these cases is run Spinrite on the drive to fix the data the best it can and lock out the bad sectors, then I use Apricorn EZ-Gig II to clone it to another drive. Both utilities run from a bootable CD, not in Windows.