Hard drive issues - help needed!

Alright, so here’s the deal—I’ve got this old 250 GB hard drive that’s basically on its deathbed. I’m just sitting here waiting for the inevitable moment it finally gives up the ghost. I managed to rescue about 50 GB of various files from it, but since I don't have enough thumb drives lying around to hold all that, a buddy of mine offered me his old 500 GB drive. Apparently, some repair shop told him it was dead, so he went out and bought a new one—though, looking back, maybe they were right after all...

I ran both drives through CrystalDiskInfo, and my dying drive is throwing these errors:
- Reallocated Sector Count (Current: 104, Data: 761, Status: failed)
- Reallocated Event Count (Data : 553, status: warning).

As for my friend's drive, it’s also throwing up warnings:
- Current Pending Sector (Current: 100, Worst: 100, Data: 1, Status: warning)
- Interface CRC Error Count - attention.

So, now I'm wondering... is this second drive actually problematic too? Are these warnings something I should be sweating, or can I ignore them?

And there's one more thing—when I plugged in this second drive, I realized it’s split into three different partitions and still has some data on it. How do I merge all that back into one single partition?

Thanks...

This second one actually shows some Current Pending Sector issues, which means it’s definitely not in tip-top shape, though it's looking a little better than that first drive you showed me. Honestly, if you don't have any other options available, I'd say just grab whatever data you need and back it up onto this slightly less damaged one—it's certainly better than having nothing at all! Just a heads-up though, those CRC errors tend to pop up quite often when you're dealing with a dodgy cable or maybe a shaky power supply driving the disk.

As for those partitions, if there's nothing on them that you actually need to keep, the easiest way to handle it is to just format the whole drive. When you go through the formatting process, you can simply merge everything into one single partition by right-clicking it in Windows File Explorer and hitting format.

And here I was thinking this second drive was in rough shape—turns out mine is actually doing better than this one. Can I run CHKDSK to fix it?
Also, regarding the formatting... I’ve got my Local Disk (I:), the System Reserved partition (G:), and a New Volume (M:) showing up. Which one should I be clicking on if I want to wipe this second hard drive?

I mean, sure, it might work, but I wouldn't trust that drive as far as I can throw it; it’s fine for a quick emergency fix if you’ve got absolutely nothing else on hand, but that's about it.

Hmm, well, if that one is the one holding those three partitions, it's probably best to just format it—just make sure you head over to Disk Management in the Control Panel to double-check which one is your actual internal drive and which one is the external one before you do anything.

David White8, if you don't care about your data, feel free to keep rambling on about that half-broken drive. But if you actually value your files, just buy a new, healthy disk and move everything over while you still can.

I’m looking for some guidance here; my technical knowledge is pretty limited, and I just want to pinpoint exactly what's going wrong and how much damage my drive has actually taken.
About a week ago, I noticed that transferring video files from my laptop to an external hard drive started taking way longer than it used to—we're talking several times slower for something like a 2GB file. It hit a breaking point yesterday when the system estimated a 2:30 minute transfer time, only for the entire computer to freeze up on me after a few minutes. I ended up having to just pull the plug because the whole thing was completely unresponsive for about an hour.
I tried running the exact same transfer again, but it was the same story; the laptop locked up just two minutes into the process.

When I rebooted, the system flagged a disk error, and once Windows finally loaded, I was bombarded with warnings saying the drive is failing and that I need to back everything up immediately.
I had already backed up all my important stuff to another external drive a while back, but then about a month ago, I had someone come over to do a clean install of Windows and get everything set up properly.
Since I don't handle the tech side myself, I have to pay for that service, so if this drive is truly dead, I’m looking at more unexpected costs for reinstalling Windows, antivirus software, and all that good stuff.

The first thing I did was download CrystalDiskInfo and run an error scan—the slow kind, obviously—and it showed 15 damaged blocks, which is about 0.6%.

To be honest, as a layman, it doesn't seem to me like such a tiny percentage of damage should be enough to make the whole drive act this erratic, unless even a single bad block can cause this level of chaos or if there's something else entirely going on.
I'm really not sure, so I'm turning to the folks on this forum for a little help.
P.S. I'll try to upload some screenshots of the warning messages since I'm not entirely sure I've explained this clearly, and maybe seeing the actual errors will help you guys wrap your heads around it and give me some solid advice.
Thanks in advance.

You might want to try downloading CrystalDiskInfo to see what the status report actually says. Honestly, having a few bad sectors usually isn't an immediate catastrophe since the system just marks them as bad and avoids using them, but I guess the real issue is that they tend to multiply over time. Long-term, you really should probably look into replacing the drive before things get messy.

Think back—have you changed anything about your copy process since these issues started popping up?

Is it the same laptop and the same drive?
Are you using the same USB ports to plug the drive in, or did you switch things up?
What about the cable? Is it the same one?
Does the drive have its own power supply, or does it need two USB ports to get enough juice?

Look, I’m leaning toward it being a drive issue too, but sometimes these headaches come down to insufficient power or just bad communication between the laptop and the drive—like using a crappy USB cable.