That HDD is (soon to be) toast. Really slow access times, spindowns, and SMART warnings are definitive that failure will occur soon.

Instead of formatting, do a full chkdsk. In Explorer, right-click the laptop drive, Properties, Tools, and schedule a scan with both options checked. Reboot and go do something else for a good while. Chkdsk will scan for bad sectors and attempt to move the data away from them to known good sectors.

When copying the files, use xcopy from a Windows command prompt instead of explorer. If any files are damaged, Explorer will issue a CRC error and halt all copying, even if the remaining files are fine. Xcopy has a commandline switch that disables the CRC check and another that continues copying despite the presence of errored files. I don't remember the switches offhand (and I'm not at a PC) so type "xcopy /?" minus the quotes for detailed help.

 

Your disk is doooooooomeeeeed

 

I just fixed a Vista laptop that was running extremely slowly, as in it was still thrashing an hour later. I checked Resource Monitor and it showed that the drive was consistently at 100% utilization, but was mostly not transferring any data (mostly 0 bytes, occasional spikes to <500 KB/sec). I tried running a level 4 pass with Spinrite (read, inverse write, inverse again) and now the drive is running normally.

Ubuntu has an easy-to-use SMART viewer in the disk utility, check there and see how many bad sectors there are. If it's in the hundreds, then it's not really worth fixing. Check eBay or similar for old/cheap 2.5" IDE drives.

I don't believe chkdsk does any write tests, just reading. /c should force xcopy to ignore errors.

 

Didn't knew spinrite. Gonna try it on my old 60GB SATA 1 drive.
Can i run it through USB case?
I need to burn a cd or i can put on a bootable pen drive?

 

Very helpful masta.g.86, thanks, and everyone else.

I ended up doing a format because I didn't get any replies. One of the photos I was backing up had that CRC error. XP installation format reported an error saying it couldn't verify the drive or something, and the installation couldn't copy some of the files, so yeah, the disk's screwed. I just told them they need to get a new HDD to fix it.

 

Didn't knew spinrite. Gonna try it on my old 60GB SATA 1 drive.
Can i run it through USB case?
I need to burn a cd or i can put on a bootable pen drive?

Yes, and either CD, floppy, or a flash drive. Be advised that depending on the test level and drive capacity, it can take a while. The level 4 pass I mentioned earlier was on a 320 GB drive, and it took somewhere around 26-28 hours. A 60 GB drive shouldn't be too bad though, provided it doesn't have a lot of bad sectors.

I've ran it on a couple of really messed up drives, and it was still cranking away a week later. I've heard of some people running it for a couple of months before it finished.

 

On the second question i wasn't clear enough.
Can i put the HDD on a USB Case and scan it from there?
Or it would be better if i connect through SATA interface?

 

You can run it through USB, although it'll probably run faster with SATA.

 

Instead of formatting, do a full chkdsk

It's not a good idea to stress a soon-to-die drive. Your first step should be backing up whatever you can. ONLY after backing up should you move to recovering data. No one can tell if it's that chkdsk that ends up breaking something more.

So
1. back up all you can
2. chkdsk x: /f /r (substitute x: for the drive letter). It'll probably run on reboot only if its a system drive.
3. after chkdsk is done, backup your stuff again but with a "skip files that exist" switch - so it copies over the stuff that is now readable.

This is what I did practically a month ago on my moms laptop that had a similarly dead hdd - SMART data was completely crazy, and displayed a bad sector count the kind of which I've never seen before. I could still just copy all documents over, run chkdsk, and then copy the remaining 30 or so pictures that had errors in them (but were copyable after running chkdsk, instead of being totally untouchable with a CRC error).

Spinrite

Watch out with Spinrite. It can try recovery so excessively that it ends up further ruining the drive.
I've used it for data recovery in the past, and even when it "repaired" a lost data block, the data on it was corrupted anyway. Same as what chkdsk usually does anyway. As far as data recovery goes, chkdsk /r works nearly the same in my experience, and you don't have to buy that once you have Windows already.

Last time I checked, Spinrite (ver 6) couldn't properly see my drives in AHCI mode, and it crashed on really big drives (1.5tb for sure - maybe on 1tb too, it's been a while since I last tried). Probably not an issue on your end, but it's the reason why I don't use it anymore.

 

I've had issues with Spinrite with drives over 500 GB, but I haven't had to run it on those very often. You can break it up into smaller pieces too, you don't have to do the whole drive at once. I've also never had problems with PCs running AHCI mode with it.

I've had much more success with Spinrite than with chkdsk on at least two drives I've run it on. For my uses, it was definitely worth the money.

To further add to the slow laptop drive I mentioned a few posts up, it also wasn't loading one of the user profiles due to corruption. Not only did running Spinrite restore the drive's speed, that user profile started loading normally.