Hard drive failed. Possible reasons?

Hi everyone, I apologize in advance for the wall of text!
So, the hard drive in my mbp has been running very slowly for a few weeks now. About a week ago I did a disk verify which then told me to repair the disk. I then upgraded from 10.6 to 10.8 and then used the repair partition to repair the disk. Everything was working fine until today when my computer started acting sluggish again.

Again I used disk utility to verify and it came up again saying I needed to repair. I went back into the recovery partition but this time it said it could not repair the disk. After thus I was no longer able to boot my computer.

I'm able to access the information from another computer which made me question why it failed in the first place. Is it possible I could have gotten a virus? Any danger in copying over some files I didn't backup before hand?

There are only very few "viruses/trojans" for OSX and I doubt that your system is infected. Backup your data while you still can and check your drive with a smart tool like Smart Utility (Does not work while connected via USB). Such slowdowns often indicate a failing hard drive.

Hard drives do fail over time. It often just happens.

I've attached the results from smart utility, should I try a reformat or does this look like a physical failure?

Replace the hard drive. No sense beating on a dead horse, the SMART utility indicates the same thing. And, there are NO viruses for OS X that are in the wild that can infect your Mac. There are some trojans which can easily be avoided by practicing safe computing.

Besides, viruses (even in the windows world) or malware or trojans will not cause a drive to physically fail. viruses, trojans, malware only affect software, not the physical hardware.

Thanks for the replies, guess I will replace the drive. Maybe now's the time to put in a SSD and swap out the superdrive .

heiko_s said:

There are NO viruses and only a few VERY RARE trojans for OSX and I doubt that your system is infected.

Click to expand...

Fixed that for you.