"unallocated" Drive

Hello. Im a newbie to this forum, but Ive visited this site many times over the years. I was working on my Windows 7 PC the other day - just doing what I do - composing some music. My box suddenly shut off and I was not able to boot it up afterward. After exhausting work, several trips to use my daughter's PC and downloading several bootable discs such as Hirens and several others, I've noticed I now have an "unallocated" 1 TB boat anchor. I always created an image file on a second partition to be able to recover in case any mishaps occurred. Low and behold, it did. And what a foolish thing to do. I should have put the back up image on a separate drive, but just didn't have the resources at the time to purchase another TB drive. I loaded up several of the programs from Hirens boot utility disk, one being a Western Digital drive scanner that tells if a drive is physically failing or not. I scanned and it said my drive "failed" the test and sectors were in "pre-failure" status, or just plain "failure" status, "old age", etc. My question is - Is there a Trojan or some kind of Mal ware that can render your hard drive to "LOOK" as though it's failing, or no? It just seems awful funny that I was on the Internet downloading a program, and it was then it happened. I tried to use a program that scans an unallocated disk to see if lost partitions are found - and yes, it has found a dozen or so, including my 750 GB storage section of the disk. I see a lot of info on restoring the partitions, re-lettering them, and then retrieving lost files. Am I just wasting my time, or is this possible? Thanks in advance, and it's great to be finally a part of this great community of people.