My precious, 60 GB disk drive is dying on me. It often doesn’t get recognized by my computer any more and when it does, it promptly crashes.
I wasn’t very smart and put a lot of important files on there from my Lost episodes and my entire music library including rare CDs that have been stolen or destroyed since ripping them to photographs that no longer exist on film. It also includes things like my CV, research papers from college (such as my linguistics thesis), and teaching materials.
I don’t think I can get it to stay open long enough to pull all of my files onto my computer’s hard disk drive. Is is possible to get it fixed without needing to reformat the drive or to salvage my things off of it?