Hard drive failure

Symptoms

A friend has recently passed me her laptop which hung at Windows loading screen. Indefinitely. Unable to reach safe mode.

What I've tried so far

- Took the drive out to try on another Windows 7 machine with a dock, but it wouldn't mount without a force reformat.
- I load up Ubuntu and I'm able to explore the drive with no issues with everything appears intact, until after some short time the explorer freezes and the drive remounts with a different /dev/sd*.
- I ran ntfsfix but no errors given, so I'm thinking the drive is failing (unsure which component).
- To confirm it was hardware failure (or to get away with it with a bit of luck) I tried to clone the disk to a raw disk image with dd but it always seem to crap out at the same point: at around 90GB in (on a 640GB drive) the drive would again remount with a different /dev/sd*. So I'm thinking perhaps a deeply scratched platter on a particular area within the disk?
- I wanted to hear what the drive sounded like, so I loaded up my machine with Windows 10 and put the drive back in a dock. It fails to stay mounted. It seems to keep unmounting and remounting every 19 seconds indefinitely. Throughout the 19 seconds, the drive would make the following sounds:
1: Spin up faster
2: Typical hard drive sounds, nothing suspicious for a few seconds (at this point, Windows recognises the drive and displays partitions in Computer)
3: 6 light clicks
4: Continuous steady spinning
5: 19 seconds is up, repeat process (at this point, Windows removes the partitions from Computer suggesting the drive is unmounted)

I feel like the arm needs replacing with a new head and I'm happy to do this, but I'm really curious as to what else I can do to troubleshoot this so that I'm sure and confident in my decision. Thoughts and guidance welcome.

Symptoms

A friend has recently passed me her laptop which hung at Windows loading screen. Indefinitely. Unable to reach safe mode.

What I've tried so far

- Took the drive out to try on another Windows 7 machine with a dock, but it wouldn't mount without a force reformat.
- I load up Ubuntu and I'm able to explore the drive with no issues with everything appears intact, until after some short time the explorer freezes and the drive remounts with a different /dev/sd*.
- I ran ntfsfix but no errors given, so I'm thinking the drive is failing (unsure which component).
- To confirm it was hardware failure (or to get away with it with a bit of luck) I tried to clone the disk to a raw disk image with dd but it always seem to crap out at the same point: at around 90GB in (on a 640GB drive) the drive would again remount with a different /dev/sd*. So I'm thinking perhaps a deeply scratched platter on a particular area within the disk?
- I wanted to hear what the drive sounded like, so I loaded up my machine with Windows 10 and put the drive back in a dock. It fails to stay mounted. It seems to keep unmounting and remounting every 19 seconds indefinitely. Throughout the 19 seconds, the drive would make the following sounds:
1: Spin up faster
2: Typical hard drive sounds, nothing suspicious for a few seconds (at this point, Windows recognises the drive and displays partitions in Computer)
3: 6 light clicks
4: Continuous steady spinning
5: 19 seconds is up, repeat process (at this point, Windows removes the partitions from Computer suggesting the drive is unmounted)

I feel like the arm needs replacing with a new head and I'm happy to do this, but I'm really curious as to what else I can do to troubleshoot this so that I'm sure and confident in my decision. Thoughts and guidance welcome.

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Thanks for responses

See attached smart log. The GSmartControl GUI did suggest some of these were high and hinted at surface damage in some sectors, but please do interpret this data with your own knowledge and let me know your thoughts.

Just a thought, is there a trial and error process I could follow to identify these dodgy sectors and get dd to skip them?

As soon as a drive is dying you should remove all important data and replace the disk. You don't want to start fiddling around with it because you could easily loose everything.

Thanks for the heads up Josh, but like many of us in this world, these things don't come with much warning. Especially for my friend who wouldn't know how to check the health status of her hard drive.

Hey no problem buddy. I completely understand, my friend had a similar problem with his HDD. Luckily enough, HDD's aren't too expensive. You can pick up a 1TB HDD for around £50, that's if you want that much storage.