Son's MBP hard drive dying?

[GGD]

graylocks wrote:
the error message said to back up as many files as possible, erase the hard drive, and reinstall. i am not able to mount the disk.

That's usually the last line of the output, the information before that has the more interesting details of what it found wrong.

Also, what is Disk Utility saying about the SMART status.

The good news is that getting into the Recovery Partition means that a lot of stuff on the computer IS working. Could just be directory corruption rather than a drive failure, but figuring out what caused the corruption in the first place is still a mystery and could have been hardware related (maybe even bad RAM, all data written to the hard drive had to go through RAM first).

[graylocks]

GGD wrote:
That's usually the last line of the output, the information before that has the more interesting details of what it found wrong.

that's all it said in the drop down window that appeared when it stopped repairing. the main window says:

checking file system
checking journaled HFS Plus volume
checking extents overflow file
checking catalog file
the volume Macintosh HD could not be verified completely
Volume repair complete
updating boot support partitions for the volume as required
Error: Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

[silvarios]

graylocks wrote:
update: the Recovery Partition booted but Disk utility was not able to repair. is there any way from within Disk utility to copy the contents of the hard drive via USB.

at least this seems to indicate that it can be started up and thus Target Mode will work.

Even with a separate partition, Isn't running a hard drive check from the same hard drive still not the best idea? Probably worth booting from a different physical drive (SD, USB, spinning platter) or disc (CD/DVD).