I tried these a while back - months, or maybe even a year, before this error:
Macrium
SeaGate Disc Wizard (Acronis)
Windows 7 File Recovery
. . . but decided on, and have been using Clonezilla
. . . you boot to the Clonezilla CD, so as I understand it, it doesn't use anything on my computer, it just blindly makes a sector by sector copy of my C: drive to the other hard drive. I think it boots to Linux - it uses a whole different operating system than Win 8.1