Windows 7 Hard Drive issue

Hi team,
I am having a weird issue with the primary drive in my laptop a Seagate Momentus XT 500gb (FWIW)
I am running Windows 7 (32bit) and have another partition running windows 8 (public release)
Recently the laptop was dropped (I am not sure if that was the catalyst or not), about 2 days ago when starting the computer Win7 prompted a chkdsk.

The chkdsk ran so slowly it took over 3 hours and it didn't even get through 1% of Stage 1 of 3.
I decided to try again and to skip the disk check stage on the next boot up, but windows 7 reported that there was an issue and that it could not load (prompting the use of the windows 7 DVD to repair the startup)

Tried that...loading the Windows7 DVD was sooooo incredibly slow, it appeared to have frozen a few times but then managed to push on to the install (or repair page). I chose repair, which appearred to start to work then stalled (I left this running overnight and by the next morning repair wasn't doing anything, it just had STARTING repair and a circling thinking icon)
I then tried getting into windows 8 which despite taking about 30 minutes to load worked.
So now I could see Drive D (windows 8 install) and the file structure was fine.
I could see the larger ~400Gb C drive in explorer but it was listed as zero bytes.
I tried to right click it to access tools and to run the repair tool, no go it just stalled.


In desperation I tried a program called Photorec (freeware) which was able to (Incredibly slowly) discover the partition structure and using a low level scan find (most) of my Image files that I wanted to recover (the ones that had not yet been backed up)...it did not get all of the files by the looks of things (and took over 18 hours to scan through and save them)
Whenever I try (with any of the programs/OS) access the C drive partition the computer appears to stall and what would normally take seconds takes hours.


I have also taken the drive out of the laptop and installed it into a desktop computer (where it is now) that is runnin windows 7. That windows 7 (on a seperate disk) also takes 30+ minutes to load (and I have to sit by the computer to wait to skip the chkdsk (otherwise it starts that and crawls for hours doing virtually nothing)
I can see the logical drive (the old laptop C) in there listed as E drive again it is listed as zero bytes and again I cannot run tools on it.
I have tried going into the manage disks section to see what it is setup as but that freezes when trying...it does not get to the disk management part.

Hope that is enough information to start with.
Any help greatly appreciated.

Ideally I would like to recover the rest of the files off it
Check to see if the drive is physically toasted
Recover the drive if it is possible.

Thanks

 

The drive smells like toasted. I see no point in trying to revive it.

Get a new one & get off whatever you can from the old one.

 

Thanks for the replys guys. I suspected as much.
I will try to find the seagate software and run that.
The only odd thing is that the slowness of the drive only appears to be related to accessing where the windows 7 C drive sits.
When I did get into windows 8 accessing the information from that 'end' of the drive was completely normal. Is it possible that if there is some physical damage it is limited to just one 'end'?

As I said, I have only managed to recover some of the data from it. There are quite a number of important photos (all of my daughter's 3rd birthday photos) that had not been backed up that I have been unable to recover, plus some of my work documents that photorec won't even look for.

I will post back the findings of the seagate diagnostic findings.
thanks