dd to backup fat32 drive?

Sorry I can't find really definite answers through google so I'm going to
demonstrate my ignorance here.
I know a little about Linux, but I don't know jack about Windows.
I have someone I do network and general tech support for in an amateur
sense, and her laptop harddrive which is installed with WindowsXP on a
fat32 drive is starting to flake out. It appears to be electrical but
that's a very rough guess--scandisk shows no errors but sometimes the
Windows system reboots to a black screen and the BIOS may report an
error message '200 Error fixed disk 0' It requires the battery to be
removed to reset it fully then.

She has data backups to the Linux router
and raid 1 samba server I made for her from an ancient desktop. Her data
is safe, but she needs a new harddrive, it seems. If she has to have a new
harddrive it means all her OS and applications have to be reinstalled
unless the old drive can be imaged before it goes. It's in a laptop so
hooking up a new 2.5" drive would be difficult. I happen to have from an
old project an 2.5" to 3.5" harddrive ATA cable adapter, which could be
used to manipulate the laptop drive from a regular PC and to transfer the
Windows partition to a new 2.5" drive. Can I dd the C drive Fat32
formatted from the laptop to an outfile (eg, drivec.img) on one of the
PC's ext3 formatted harddrives, and then reverse that from the drivec.img
outfile to a new 2.5" harddrive with one large fat32 partition on it, and
will the new drive boot?
I don't have two laptop->3.5" ata adapters and if i do this I need to do
it very soon, so I'm not looking to buy a second adapter. But with one
adapter I can't make a straight transfer from one laptop drive to another,
there would have to be an intermediate stage where the partition data is
stored to a normal harddrive which would probably have ext3 or reiserfs on
it. Is this going to work?

--
Get Big Brother out of my email to reply.
.

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