It's a 500 GB Seagate laptop hard drive that came with my Macbook Pro. Apple partition format.

Already replaced and now have it external, connected via SATA/USB adapter. Trying to get just a few files that I worked on while out of town when it crashed (and thus did not have my time machine backup drive).

Drive will not mount, but OS X Disk Utility detects it and can read the capacity, model number, and even the name of the partition, which leads me to believe all hope may not be lost.

Failed attempts so far:

• Disk Utility verify+repair says drive cannot be repaired and that I should back up immediately (lovely)
• Disk Warrior says it cannot rebuild the directory due to hardware failure
• Data Rescue quick & deep scans immediately failed
• PhotoRec says "error reading sector" for every sector (at least for the few minutes I let it run before closing it to explore other options)

What else can I try here? Again, I'm just looking for a few, small files (python scripts to be specific) - not a full recovery.