What exactly do these MHDD results mean?

[Dave48838]

I had a laptop come in that had a corrupt windows vista os on it. I was asked to install a copy of 7 nib that he provided. He asked I first get his pics, docs and whatnot off first.

When I booted the laptop to go into safe mode, it would just hang on me. So I pulled the 250 seagate drive and connected it directly to the sata port on my dc5100 board and booted windows off the other port, and when I hooked it up to my tower, it said the drive needs to be formatted. So I ran a MHDD scan. it was looking good for the first minute, then I got about 5 lines of >500ms followed by an X for unc error followed by 3 10ms sectors in between so it looked like >500, X, 10ms, 10ms, 10ms >500, X, 10ms, 10ms, 10ms >500, X, 10ms, 10ms, 10ms . . . after the five lines of that, it would look normal for a minute the it would repeat. I aborted the scan after the fourth cycle of this.

Questions:

1. Are results like this from being dropped while running or something else?

2. To recover his pics and documents, should I image the drive or send it off to someone with some better equipment than what I have?

[labtech]

1. Not necessarily and unlikely.
2. Yes, better to send to a specialized data recovery company. Do your research for credentials before sending.

[Dave48838]

So what causes issues like this?

[drc]

From your description it sounds like a failed/failing head

[Dave48838]

That's kind of what I was thinking, but it almost seems like it is too consistent to be an intermittent failing head. I will put it in my pile of hard drives to diagnose further when I get better equipment.

Thanks for the responses,

Dave