So the title might give you a hint, I'll explain with more detail.
I currently have 2 HDDs on my system, a 1TB drive where the OS and all software is (games, programs) and another 320GB drive where all my stuff is (photos, downloaded files... You get it). The latter is an old drive I had in my old PC and it's like 4 or 5 years old, which I think it's not that much.
Some time ago the 320GB started disappearing randomly of "My Computer", after a "Scan for HW changes" in device manager the HDD comes back to life. I can access it, read/write files and everything you'd expect to do with an HDD. It sometimes has slow loading times, but once its loaded the drive works at normal speeds.
But the new thing that has been happening since a couple of days is that scanning for HW changes doesn't work, even though in both, device manager and computer management->drives the drive is there as well as in the BIOS. In computer management, I can see the drive but it shows that its "Uninitialized"... I know that you have to initialize a drive when it's new, but this ain't no new drive. So I have 2 options so far, try to initialize it and loose all my files (photos and videos is what I'm most concerned of) or have a unusable disk 8with all my info in it) which I can try to recover in some way.
I made an HDtune test and shows few bad sectors, even windows chkdsk recover some of them afterwards. I think that my HDD is turning slow, that's why it always disappeared, but now all my files are corrupt... I'm planning on getting a bigger HDD to store all of my data maybe an ext drive I don't know.
I'd like to know if I can make an image of the HDD with, I don't know, a USB-Bootable Linux and then export it to a new drive.
Any help is greatly appreciated!