Failing Hard Drive on Inspirion 17

For what it's worth it's an Inspirion 17 (7746). Came with Win 8 and I upgraded it to Win 10 when MS offered it for free. I tried a third party program (Acronis True Image) and it got stuck half way through the back up process saying "Failed to read from sector XXXXX. Check Disk Utility didn't accomplish anything.

Your best bet is to just copy your data files to an external hard drive or flash drive FIRST.  You may or may not be able to back up the entire drive at this point -- or make a recovery image.

How that's done depends on:

What model Inspiron 17 (1721?  5721?)

What operating system and version?

Is the OS original to the system?

Has the OS been manually installed at any point, or is it the factory install?

If this is older than Windows 10, there's a utility on it called Dell Backup and Restore.  If it's Windows 10, you can use the OS to make a set of recovery media.

Thanks. My back up program has an advanced setting to "Ignore Bad Sectors" and continue the backup process without stopping. It's presently running that way on my problem laptop. We shall see what that accomplishes, if anything?

As long as Windows 10 is activated, you can download the Windows 10 media direct from Microsoft and reinstall it once the drive is replaced.

The chances of being able to make a complete system image at this point are just about zero - the drive clearly has bad sectors on it.  You can try running a full chkdsk /f (from a command windows with admin privleges, then reboot) - then retry making the image, but it's unknown how much damage there is and whether it'll actually work.

BACK UP your data files NOW if Windows will still load.  If it won't, remove the drive, mount it in an external case and attach it to a working system -- make the file backup before you completely lose the drive.  Do this BEFORE you try another system image.

Once you're sure your data files are safe, you'll then have to do a manual reload of Windows from the 10 media -- which you can download here:

www.microsoft.com/.../windows10

The problem will come if there's data in any of those ignored bad sectors.  If there is, and the sectors hold critical Windows data, the drive won't boot once you use that image.

Back up the data you can't afford to lose FIRST, before proceeding.

Already did, thanks for the excellent advice.

what about using Win 10 to create a system image -- to an external hard drive. Can I then restore the system image to a newly installed hard drive?

Same deal as with any other imaging utility - if you can get the image made, yes, it'll do the job.  

If TrueImage failed to make an image, Windows 10 isn't going to fare any better -- if anything, it's less likely to succeed.