tl;dr Hard drive is having problems. What do you recommend to repair the hdd or backup/recover the data?

Bought an internal SATA 2TB Hitachi for data a few weeks ago (1TB Seagate for Windows 7 x64). I booted up on day and Windows insisted on running chkdsk. It took hours and apparently the Hitachi was in bad shape because it kept finding all kinds of errors.

Windows still sees the Hitachi, but it can't find most of the files. I've tried chkdsk, backup software, recovery software, but they all run fine for 30sec and then freeze. It's been days now and can't find anything decent, but I'm sure I just haven't found the right software for the job.

I'd just like hear your opinion on what's the best tool to repair hard drives or recover files to another partition. Maybe a nice tutorial?

Thanks, /g/