Q. How do I get the data off my hard drive so I can reformat or replace it?

The easiest way is to buy an external hard drive. Yes, it will cost some money but you really need to have a backup drive for your data. Don’t ever trust your data to one media device only.  Every hard drive in the world will fail sooner or later.

If you are replacing your hard drive, you could buy the replacement internal hard drive plus an external enclosure.  That makes it easy to do the migration – put the new drive in the enclosure, clone the old drive to the new, then physically swap the drives. If the old drive is still functional, you can use it in the enclosure as a backup or data transport drive.

If you are reformatting the existing drive in place, then you can clone the internal drive to the new external, reformat it, and then either clone the drive back, or bring back just the folders you need, including the music.

A good program for cloning a drive is HDClone http://www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html
or
Acronis TrueImage or DiskDirector http://www.acronis.com/

Your hard drive manufacturer may also offer some software by download
Seagate DiskWizard http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/discwizard
Western Digital TrueImage http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119

For a Mac,
CarbonCopyCloner http://www.bombich.com/
or
SuperDuper http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

The alternative is to use a USB memory keychain ‘drive’ to copy off your data folders, but for the cost of 32 GB or 64 GB flash drives, you are better looking at a 250 GB or larger hard drive. The hard drive will also be much faster than the flash drive.