A technician needs to reimage a system that is failing to boot properly. The system has important data that needs to be preserved. Which of the following steps should the technician take FIRST to ensure both the reimaging process and data preservation?
Run a disk defragmentation on the primary drive.
Replace the system's hard drive with a new one.
Boot the system using a live OS and back up the data to an external drive.
Perform a clean installation of the operating system.