Hard drive failure or corrupt recovery discs?

A few weeks ago I decided to do a clean install of Windows 7 on my VPC-F1190X. I created the recovery discs and following Joe Bleau's guide I succesfully did the install.

The laptop seemed to be working fine until last week when the screen suddenly went black and the laptop unresponsive. I powered it down and upon rebooting got the error message "Operating system not found". After a few more attempts with the same result I decided to try a clean install again.

The install process started and at 26% completed, when prompted to insert disc 2, same as before, I did. This time, however, when the install reached 36% the disc stopped spinning and the install hung. Thirty plus minutes later I got some error message, can't rememer what it said, that the install failed. I tried two more times, each time with same result, the install hanging at 36%.

Is the hard drive failing or are the recovery discs corrupt?

 

Create a USB-stick with Ubuntu, boot from it and use any application that shows SMART status of the drive (all of the attributes, not just a summary) and post it here.

 

The hard drive failed. I replaced it.