Is this hard drive toast?

[yellow1053]

Hi All. I have been asked by a friend to look at his laptop and try to see why it wouldn't work. it gave a general error when trying to turn on, indicating a HDD failure of some sort. I removed the drive and USB slaved it to my desktop. it sees three different partitions as this laptop has a recovery partition built into it. it's an HP laptop with Windows 7 on it. (outdated, I know). he has a bunch of pictures on it, from events he won't be able to recreate, and would like to get them back if at all possible. it's not earth shattering if it can't be done, and he won't spend hundreds to make it happen, but if I can do it for him, he would appreciate it. I ran two different hard drive utility scanners on it. The first was HDDScan v4.1 which gives a S.M.A.R.T. Report that shows 3 yellow caution flags, and the rest green. the three are: Reallocation Sector Count, Reallocation Event Count, and Current Pending Errors Count. it's a 500 GIG HD Model: HGST HTS725050A7E630 So, my question is: Does anyone know what errors in those three categories means? is our only hope using the recovery partition and losing all the data?
The second program I used was: Crystal Disk Info 4.1.3 which only showed errors in two of the categories: Current Pending Sector Count, and Reallocated Sector Count.
Thanks for any advice.
Jim.

[pclab]

That drive have bad sectors for sure.
What you should do: image the drive to another one, for instance with DD_Rescue or HDDsuperclone.
If all goes fine, probably you get the drive to boot and all working again.
If not, then you can try to use some kind of recovery software to recover the files you need.

But in the end, that drive is toast.

[HaQue]

did you try and take an image of the drive first? You can download DMDE, then image the whole drive to a file. at least then you have a copy if and when the drive fails from all the testing. Likely you can just mount the disk image and copy files straight out

I don't see the point in running testing on it when your goal is data recovery, as you are just working the drive longer when it has a problem... leaving more chance it will totally die

[yellow1053]

Ok, I downloaded the DMDE software, and ran it. The first thing the program does is "partition searching" and it gave the following error: LBA:8 392 720 (try 1): WinError 121. The semaphore timeout period has expired.
So I can't even get to a point where I can image the drive.

[lcoughey]

Ok, I downloaded the DMDE software, and ran it. The first thing the program does is "partition searching" and it gave the following error: LBA:8 392 720 (try 1): WinError 121. The semaphore timeout period has expired.
So I can't even get to a point where I can image the drive.

You are supposed to image the drive before running file system recovery software. Try cloning with ddrescue or hddsuperclone in Linux.

[HaQue]

you can cancel the scan. Once the window is available, right click the drive (not the partition) and choose clone

But yes I agree with Luke that HDDSuperClone would be ideal for this