Son's MBP hard drive dying?

[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).