backing up the HDD

Hey, I searched trying to find this out, but couldn't find anything. I've got FFXI, and my HDD just started to fail. So, I need to backup everything to put on a new HDD.... is there anything special I need to know to do this? I'm just going to connect it to my computer, and make an image of the disk (if I still can).
Any advice would really be appreciated, thanks in advance.

You can try clone maxx (freeware) to dup the disk to another 40 gb disk. If your source disk has some defective areas, there is a switch you can use to ignore defective areas during the transfer.