Sounds like a hardware problem -- your hard disk is bad. You're able to copy data fine until the drive head hits a file that's sitting on a bad spot. At that point, the computer will try over and over to read the data and "stall." This will happen regardless of which of the three methods you're attempting to use to recover your data (all of those methods will work, by the way).

Your best bet is to try to figure out which files are holding up the copy and then try to avoid those files. In other words, copy your data in small groups of files rather than in one big mass (yes, it is tedious).

See if your failing hard disk is still under the manufacturer's warranty -- some of them are covered for three years.