Question About Data Recovery From Hard Drive

It's not a major recovery effort, but now that I'm into it I'm curious.

I believe my hard drive failed, but I suppose it could have been malware....I share this laptop with teen boys. 'Nuff said.

I went to bed when Vista was updating. When I got back on the laptop, Windows wouldn't start. I tried running Start Up repair from the disc - unsucessfully. I then decided just to reinstall Windows, but I got error doing that, too. Don't remember what it was. So I just put a new drive in it and went on with life.

Trying to break my packrat ways...I want to throw away this drive, but two things. First, I wanted to make sure it's really bad, and not just infected wit some hostile malware. Second, there are a couple of files I thought were in Dropbox but aren't I'd like to recover if possible, so I read through some threads here and downloaded Recuva.

First thing I did was to see if Windows could read the drive. It did, so I started a search in Recuva. It seemed to hang before it could even give me an estimate of the time required, and the little light on my external drive box went out, so I killed Recuva with Task Manager. Now when I right-click the drive in Windows, I can't see the data any more. It just hangs up that program too.

And the light on the box goes out - can't do anything until I unplug it from the USB and plug it back in.

So, was that glimpse I got of the contents just the last sign of life from a now totally-dead-beyond-all-hope drive?