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My son dropped his laptop in the afternoon, the win 8.1 laptop did work after for the whole evening, but the next morning was giving errors like "Your PC cannot start properly" and "Your PC needs to be repaired", Iid try to run the win 8.1 repair options, but nothing helped.

I took the disk out and mounted with USB cable as an external disk on another win 7 laptop.
Initially the windows 7 asked me if I want to fix the disk and mark the bad sectors and I said Yes - (not sure it this is a fatal mistake) after the program worked for some time it finally said this drive needs to be formatted and after that I cannot see the disk any longer under windows 7.

Now I am running testdisk-7.1 but after every cylinder it analyses, it gives me the following error

Disk /dev/sdb/ -500 GB /465 GiB - CHS 60801 255 63
Analyse cylinder 112/60800: 00%
Read error at 111/236/62 1798144

Also I think it is running pretty slow at a rate of 5 cylinders per minute out of total of 60800 cylinders. The disk is a Seagate Momentus Thin 500GB.
Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated... Thanks a lot!

I think it's a more severe problem than bad sectors: one or several damaged heads. You should contact a data recovery company.
Software solution will not help in this case.

Can you please tell me should I attempt to make an image of the disk and continue the software route or this can further damage the disk - like the broken heads scratching the surface? Thanks a lot,