So should I forget about my HDD when the SMART self-test fails? Any chance something like badblocks might help?

when smart reports problems you should get a replacement soon or your data is lost.

attempting to recover bad blocks *MIGHT* help to retrieve your data from that disk and copy it all onto your new disk. If SMART fails it's time to say "thank you for your service, you've served me well" to your disk.

@netikras @stop Thanks for advice, I already got the backup. Just wanna know if there's still hope :(

I'm still in the shock phase

@beleg smatrt is not perfect, but if it shows errors you must be fast with the replacement.

also might depend on an error. if bad-block an error you call a single then it might be a bit too early to throw the disk away: SMART has a pool os spare blocks to mitigate some block failures. When that pool is exhausted it's time to throw it away

Just ran a non-destructive badblocks and the SMART's Current_Pending_Sector grew from 740 to 780.

Well I guess that's not what you call a single, right? @netikras