Hard disk failing -- how to safely backup data / remove bad sectors?

I'm sorry if this is posted in the wrong forums, I wasn't sure where to go.
It appears that I have a bad block on my hard drive. During normal boot-up, arch ran its regular scan of my / partition, and failed giving an error that looked something like:
Error reading block 13303898 (something here about a short read) while getting next inode from scan.
It then let me login as root for maintenance and mounted / as read only. By doing some work with du, I was able to narrow the problem to a bunch of files in a single folder. Attempting to access them with du gave the error
Ext3-fs error (device sda4): ext3_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode block - inode=3328795, block=13303898
The block was the same for all of the bad files, although the inode changed.
First question (probably the most important): Is it safe to mount my hard drive in read-write mode to try to backup my data? If I do so, what is the best way to proceed?
Second question (hopeful here, but not optimistic): The folder with the bad block is not critical at all. I've had the harddrive for less than a year, so I'm hoping it just got bumped and isn't completely dying. I'd like to think I can back up my data, use some software to ignore the bad block, and go on my merry way using the rest of my hard drive. Is this feasible or even possible? If so, how would I go about fixing this?
(Sigh) all of this the week before my final exams too, with critical data on the hard drive. Oh well, when it rains it pours I guess...

I would backup all the data I could to another HD, then I would zero de drive with dd and try to read it back with dd and see if it complains.
It may be a transient problem due to a failed write and not a physical problem.
Something similar happened to me before. But either way if dd solves your problem I would still keep a close eye on that disk.

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Hi,
Here is a topic which helps you to clone the old HDD:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-to-clone-and-copy-your-hard-drive/
Regards.
BH
**Click the KUDOS thumb up on the left to say 'Thanks'**
Make it easier for other people to find solutions by marking a Reply 'Accept as Solution' if it solves your problem.

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Hard disk failing -- how to safely backup data / remove bad sectors?

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