Yeah, death throes. I had one come back to life recently though. It had been taking very long to spin up and one day it just gave up the ghost. Then a week later it returned, I had more or less forgotten it was there, still churning along slow as ever, but allowing me to salvage what I wanted from it.
Some temp files/ program casche created by photoshop and something else probably hastended its demise.
Don't bother with a disk check, before you have recovered what you want. There are only so many reads left, it might not make it.