Nearly dead hard drive, need a little help.

[Streeteh]

My sisters laptop hard drive has sadly bitten the dust. I have a replacement on the way but i'm currently going through the chore of trying to retrieve whatever i can from the old drive. Windows won't let me even access the drive, it shows in my computer but the capacity isn't visible and explorer hangs when i double click/right click on the drive.

I tried a trial of some software called recover my files which did actually manage to get into the hard drive and even allowed me to view some of her photos and music files so the hard drive definitely isn't completely dead. Unfortunately recover my files seems to be designed for recovering deleted files; it won't let me just copy existing files away to another drive. Ideally i need some software that will access the drive much in the same way as recover my files but will just let me copy the files to another drive. A small price would be ok but ideally some free software would be perfect (recover my files costs a whopping $70 so it's kinda out of the question on that front too)

Cheers in advance for any advice.