The Google disk drive study "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" (disk_failures.pdf) found that "After their first reallocation, drives are over 14 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without reallocation counts, making the critical threshold for this parameter also one."
Now they were studying disk drives in professionally maintained data centers and this is a laptop drive, so YMMV. Also, the study isn't perfect, but it's pretty good.
45 reallocations on a disk drive just sounds crummy. The only reason that the drive scans good is because some of those sectors have been pushed out to the "backup" area at the edge of their zone.
Get the data off of the disk drive while you can. An imaging tool xfer to a like sized drive sounds good. Take the laptop drive out and put it in some cheap, tiny aluminum USB enclosure and wipe it twice. Make sure the laptop puts out enough power on its USB ports to power that enclosure. Give it to the client for some minor use like transporting files from home to work to home. Impress on the client to never put anything on the drive that isn't on some other hard drive. The drive will likely fail in a few months ... or maybe not. In which case the client now has a pocket sized USB disk.
You might try the HDDScan erase test (
http://hddscan.com) for the first wipe. The Russian developer of that freeware program really knows what he is doing. His website has some really cool info/stuff on it.
Facebook
Twitter