making an image of my hdd

OK, i woke up this morning with my computer just restarting....the hard drive powers on and then clicks and then powers off and then reboots, hdd powers on clicks and then powers off. It sounds like the fucking hdd is dying on me. Now i have a 250gigger that works semi. I want to hook it up and boot off a norton ghost cd and make an image of the dying hdd and store it on the 250giger...can I do this? just boot off the cd and create an image on the 250giger and then buy a new hdd and then restore the image onto the new hdd? If so..anyone have any guides on what I want to do or tell me if my way of thinking makes sense?

hmm you can use ghost but you might need to use command switches to specify to ignore certain errors as it will try to make a perfect image.

ghost switches[=http//service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ghost.nsf/pfdocs/1998082612540625]ghost switches

if it is clicking you likely will get little to no data. What I would do is disconnect the failing drive, install windows on your 250, then try to recover your important files one at a time with explorer.

You can also try running recovery software (my personal favorite is Ontrack Easy Recovery) to grab the files.

Try the freezer trick, but be warned once you do the drive is really going to be toast. freezing it works temporarily so you can grab data but it will kill the drive.

thx for your input...i formatted the 250 and installed xp. and than ran the 120 as a primary slave and booted the 250 windows, it took like 20 mintues just to access the 120 so i rebooted and it ran a chkdsk automatically and found a bunch of errors and it fixed it and now it's running real smooth but i'm gonna back up the data and get a new hdd