Possible to Recover Files from Cloned HDD?

I'm trying to recover lost data from an old hard drive that crashed. If I were to make a system image from the old drive on my new laptop running windows 8.1, would I then be able to scan for all the lost files off of the image, and not need to have the old drive constantly hooked up to my laptop? the program I'm using is Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery, though if there's a better program, i can use that. i'm curious just because i will soon start to need to move my laptop around a lot, and it's impractical to constantly restart the scan, especially since i can't restart where i stopped

im not sure it would work from an image.

A couple of friends used a data recovery service and had good experiences if you think the data lost would be worth the money.

it will be a lot of money, and no guarantees.