Question Potentially failing hard drive?

[blokewhoknowsnothingabouttech]

Had my first BSOD the other day.

Seemed very strange because I wasn't really doing anything that would've been particularly hard on the computer (was just browsing the web), and I hadn't made any recent hardware or changes at all.

The screen appeared, and my machine quickly restarted. This automatically triggered a disc check, which seemed to be uneventful and was completed fairly quickly, followed by a windows update.

For some reason, I didn't notice an error code when the BSOD appeared, so I had very little idea what caused the issue. When the update finished and I rebooted into windows, my computer initially seemed fine. I then looked into the event viewer and couldn't find any errors leading up to the crash. I therefore began to assume this could've just been a one off event. I then turned off the computer for the evening.

However, yesterday, I turned on the computer and noticed that it was running rather slowly, and some applications kept freezing. Considering the events of the previous day, I was perhaps more wary of these kind of issues. I therefore opened event viewer to see if anything was amiss.

Four errors - "DeviceHarddisk0DR0 has a bad block"

I then turned the computer off as I now assumed that this means that my hard drive is on the way out. It's a 10ish year old mechanical hard drive so I'd say it's probably getting a bit tired.

However, I'd like a second opinion to confirm this before I purchase a nice SSD and set about transferring my data over to that.

My PC (this is probably laughably old and low spec to a lot of people, but it suits my needs and so far it's served me well, haha) -

CPU - Intel i7 4790 (3.6GHz)
GPU - Zotac GTX 1060 6GB
Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-H81M-H
RAM - 12GB DDR3
HDD - Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB HDD
OS - Windows 10 Pro x64
PSU - EVGA 600W

 

[blokewhoknowsnothingabouttech]

Yes, cloning should absolutely happen first.
But, that is all on the recovery company.

Not on the user to tell them what to do or how to do their job.

And again, this falls into 'data recovery', rather than trying to resurrect the entire drive.

As I say, I simply explained what happened, asked if anything could be done, and was then told that an “image” of the drive would be created on a stable hard drive using professional software. Then, depending on if the image is good enough, this would be used to create a “clone”

I have not told the company to follow any method, I have simply asked them what process would be employed