Recovering from dying hard drive and/or R&R?

[AySz88]

My X60 Tablet's original HDD is flaking out. (story at end...)

The drive runs slowly and doesn't boot successfully, and might have data that I don't have backed up. I have my backups on a network mapped drive. I tried a R&R 3.1 startup CD, but it does NOT see the backup I took on the day the drive started dying (it sees only up to 10/10/2009). I think I probably upgraded R&R to 4.x at some point, so should I even expect R&R 3.1 to see that last backup? Also, when I select that 10/10 backup, it says that it "was created by a previous version of this program" - but that doesn't make any sense, since, if anything, it was created by a more recent version. Is it worth somehow getting a R&R 4.2 startup disk to see if it can see a more recent backup? Or somehow getting a R&R 4.x recovery partition?

My first priority is to recover all the data I can, and be able to access my files. I'd rather get those files from that backup (if it exists) than the flaky HDD. I have an unformatted 500GB notebook drive (that I'd like to be my main drive at the end of all this), and a lot of space on my desktop computer if needed. I don't have a SATA enclosure for 2.5'' drives specifically - but I think I can rig up the one I have that was made for 3.5'' (right?). In addition to that, the laptop's still under warranty, so I can probably send the drive in for a replacement (or can they send me the replacement first?) if I do it before January. I also have a bunch of Windows 7 licenses.

What's my best course of action?

* The disaster story: The laptop was in the middle of a scheduled backup (to a mapped network drive) when it kept getting stuck unable to read some files. I rebooted into SpinRite without really checking that the backup had finished (I saw no network activity, but that's probably no guarantee). SpinRite got bogged down trying to recover a string of bad sectors, and somehow in that process, a ton (~hundreds) of other sectors across the disk also went bad. The HDD's now gone past its SMART limits, so I figure more SpinRite'ing would be bad.

[Kyocera]

I'd get all the data off that failing drive that you can..... fast .

Not sure what you mean by rig up the enclosure, if the enclosure will support 2.5inch sata laptop drives and has external power you can use it to transfer data to your new drive once installed.

Personally I'd forget about using R&R to restore your data, best used on a non-failing drive, all the thrashing might cause your drive to fail faster.

[AySz88]

The failing HDD's already out of the laptop... And the enclosure is for 3.5-inch drives, so putting a 2.5-inch in there could do bad stuff like let the circuit board come into contact with the case (of course, I just would avoid putting it in the case, but it does make it a little bit more sketchy... :p ).

And you've got me thinking...is there a way to get a copy of R&R up (with a non-failing drive, of course) without doing a factory restore of some sort? Is there a download on the Lenovo site that'd let you run R&R or burn a R&R startup CD from a random non-Lenovo desktop, for example?