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?

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

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

So what causes issues like this?

From your description it sounds like a failed/failing head

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

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