Need some help

Ok...sort of a newbie, but trying hard.

I have been receiving hard drive failure errors for a few weeks...

Decided to replace..bout a new SATA hard drive with equivalent specs as original (7200 and 500GB). Bought the ATI software, along with rocketfish external USB hard drive adapter.

I tried directly cloning disc with new disc in USB connection. -- this did not work and painfully slow.

I tried making a recovery CD (without backup) and swithcing out disks (new disk in pc - old as USB connection) and tried cloning again this time I received failure multiple times due to bad sectors.

I am now backing up the data - but I am away from home on vacation and do not have external storage - so am using the new hard drive as back up disk....I have no clue if this will work...I keep getting sector errors here as well.

Ultimately...all I want to do is clone my failing hard drive to the new one and save all my stuff so my world can continue in the usual order....

Please help if you can