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I'll just jump in and jump right back out.

I've used Macrium to completely image every partition on a drive to an external, with verify. NOT cloning, partition imaging. Then replace the main drive (SATA 0), plugged external back in and drag 'n drop using Macrium back to the new empty drive. Nothing done to new drive to prep. Booted right up.

It's not hard, but a little time consuming.

Time is what you do not have a lot of right now. The longer you wait to do the process, the greater the risk. That risk is going to increase geometrically.....meaning tomorrow will be twice as risky as today. 2 days out, 4 times., etc., etc. Do as simrick and dalchina advise. Get a decent spinner replacement and external. Do the process before you can't. If it's borderline too late already, simrick's plan B is in order.

Yup, means your disk is going down.

Now, have you already got backups of your personal files? If so, you're heading for a reinstall with a new disk.

If not, oops. I'm afraid it's just a question of how much you're going to lose, and you will discover rather painfully how useful it will be in the future to use disk imaging and a good backup strategy.

You now need to try to copy what you can of your personal data from your disk by hand to external storage. If you try to copy huge folders you will probably find this fails part way- or you may be lucky. it all depends on how your disk is failing.

Do whatever you can to not write anything more to your failing drive.

Have you created any partitions on your failing drive?

What's on the drive besides Windows? If it's just programs, those are things that can be reinstalled after you get a new drive in there.

On the other hand, if you've got data that needs to be saved, then we've got some work to do.

Sounds good news... hope you've got your external drives backed up!

And hopefully you know all the license keys for your installed programs where relevant.

But it is likely to be unreliable as a PC.

Okay, glad you haven't lost any data off the bad drive.
If you need any keys, you might try installing Belarc Advisor (free). It will give you a complete system inventory, and in there will be software keys. It doesn't grab Office 2013/2016, but you can get that when you log into your MS account.

Please keep on top of your externals, and don't expect them to last forever. All data needs redundancy. I had a friend tell me all important stuff was on an external, and had been for years, so it was "safe". When we plugged it in to write a backup to it, it wouldn't write anything. The drive, (or the PCB inside), was failing. Luckily I was able to pull all the data off before it bit the dust.

p.s. CRC errors can sometimes be corrected with multiple runs of CHKDSK. But a failing drive is a failing drive.

CreativSelf said:

Have the external hard drives backed up? This is actually one big concern I've always had at the back of my mind. All my important stuff are actually on those external hard drives and I can't afford to buy another 4 TB just to have 2 copies of everything. What exactly do you mean by back up?

That's exactly what I'm saying. Redundancy is key. Drives fail, and they can fail without warning. External drives especially - the internal PC board usually fails first, (before the drive), so you can usually pry the case open and get to your data. However, in the case of Western Digital, they now solder their drives directly onto the PCB, so when the PCB fails, your data is held hostage to a data recovery service (such as theirs).

Redundancy is key. Is the value of your data worth the cost of another drive? What would happen if you lost your data? Could you live without it? i.e. is your data worth this? seagate 5tb drive - amazon.ca CDN$160.

Best practice is 3-2-1: three total copies of data, two local and regularly swapped, one set off-site.