I have a friend who dropped her laptop, and the hard drive no longer boots and is throwing tons of errors but not 100% errors. Naturally, she has a lot of pictures on it she has nowhere else. The drive isn't recognized in windows as a secondary drive, either.

I looked at it with my spinrite and it found a ton of errors near the beginning of the drive (part of a dell diag partition, I think). I didn't let it go to the end, though - I needed the machine for other work and it was projecting 400+ hours.

I think I want to clone it (errors and all) first, then have a second go at it with spinrite or something else. If the FAT is completely hosed on the primary partition but the files still exist, is there any reasonable way of finding the pictures?

I have an HP workstation I can hook it to, and a spare drive of appropriate size for cloning. I'm thinking some sort of bootable CD with the utility would be appropriate. A friend pointed me towards clonezilla. Are there any other reliable, reasonably user friendly (or very well documented) free tools I should look at? Or any other guidance?

Many thanks!

-jk