Hard drive failure?

Let me know what you guys think. I'm working on this machine that has been working fine, then suddenly "strike f1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utilities" appears. The BIOS doesn't show recognition of the hard drive.

I checked the cables and everything, it all seems to be in order. I moved the hard drive to an empty channel on my PC and booted it up. Surprisingly, it worked. I shut down the computer to restart (I had accidentally booted to the new drive instead of mine) but when I restarted again, the same problem occurred - the BIOS doesn't recognize the drive. I also noticed I didn't hear the drive spin up this time like it had previously.

I'm thinking the drive is just about dead. My main question: is there any way to get the drive working long enough to get the data off of it? If so, is there a program that will easily image the drive so when I buy a replacement drive I can push the data back on? I'm not sure why the drive would sometimes spin up fine and sometimes not, but I'm concluding it's just about dead.

Thanks guys.

 

 

 

 

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