Hard drive displaying "FAILURE IMINENT" will not boot into Windows

Hi All,

I have a friends HP Pavilion laptop who asked me to retreive the data from his hard drive for him as it is out of warranty and Professional data recovery is too expensive for him, the laptop is showing a message "FAILURE IMINENT" and if I press F2 to continue the Windows Vista operating system starts to boot up then just before the welcome screen appears the screen is black and just hangs there and does not proceed anymore.
I have removed the hard drive and connected it to my own laptop via a usb adapter cable to try and use data recovery tools to get the data from the drive but as soon as the drive is connected to my computer then my computer is slow while running programs like data recovery and windows disk management that are trying to access this drive and as soon as I disconnect the drive then my computer runs quickly again.
I have just downloaded and burned a Ubuntu Live cd that when I opened up would quickly see that the drive is there but unfortunately I had to leave it there and go to work.
After putting the drive back into the HP laptop I have tried booting from my dvd drive with my own windows disk but after the option to boot from the dvd drive the computer will then try to boot from the internal hard drive and again gets stuck before the welcome screen.
Could somebody please advise me of a software that will work for this problem, I have experienced a similar problem with a flash drive last year which would not format properly and cause my computer to run slow and I threw it away so as I have run into this problem twice now I am sure there is someone out there who could shed some light on this problem.

Thanks in advance.

Marcus Allen.

 

Could you not continue with the ubuntu solution to copy the data off to another disk? If that's not working look for a copy of ERD Winternals (boot to the live cd) and also Bart PE off the internet and try booting to them with the disk connected via usb adapter and see if you can copy the data off. With certain serious disk errors though you'll never be able to mount the disk again even after repairing the file system, mft, mbr, bootsector, etc so you might lose data.