So for whatever reason, I've become to goto guy for a friend of mine about every computer problem he has. Back in the day, around 13 years ago, I was pretty tech savvy, knew my way around a computer, but kind of diverted from that path. What makes it worse, is the computer HDD that he wants me to save has files that important to his business and clients.

Heres the message that he sent me.

"I have an old hard drive from an external that stopped working. The disk is asking me to format it, which I haven't, because I don't want to lose my files on it. Anyways, do you think you'd be able to correct this for me; and perhaps another disk that just started down this road?"

Does it sound like the HDD has developed bad sectors?

Any help with how to best recover the drive or at least recover the files, would be greatly appreciated.

Edit

The drive was an external, the external housing power input failed, so he removed the drive and bought a set of connectors that allowed him to plug the drive in through the usb. Thats when the formatting issue started.