Help with Hard Drive. Please

Hi guys, Happy Holidays. i need some advice here. My friend HHD stop working two days ago and that HDD containes a lot of information, for example, 10 movies, some programs installations, such as, adobe CS3 and music. In fact he downloaded everything from the internet, so you know most of it is illegal. anyway the HDD has a 5 year warranty so he can replace it, but he wants to know if he send it back, would he get in trouble or what can happen??. any advice would be nice.

i dont know, he told me everything was working good until a message apper in windows saying that a problem occur writing some information in the HDD and the computer froze, he wait for 2 minutes and then he turn it off and then he turn it on again and then before load windows XP a black scree apperared saying that the disk status was bad, and have to backup data and replace. then he disconnect the slave "the faulty HDD" and then turn on the pc and it was working fine again, but everytime he connect the slave it wont boot.

I wouldn't send it in, it's like taking "illegal?" pictures in to get developed, if they find it they can turn it in.. He's not going to get any time, but theres a chance he could get fined.. Probably a small risk either way, but he should just cough up the $ for the movies, if he does happen to get into trouble it won't be worth it..

well he can get into the BIOS and he can see the HDD in the BIOS but it wont load windows

so it pretty much sums up to bad sectors, meaning bad hdd
it's up to your friend what your friend wants to do with the faulty hdd

I think some hdd companies have software (and third party as well) that can help their hdds "patch up" bad sectors if not fixable
(which means it creates a dummy file that occupies the bad sectors, make the hdd not utilize those sectors or something of that nature)

also depends where the bad sectors are located
(it could mean trouble if the bad sector(s) happen to be at the MBR)

and lastly, it's up to your friend if your friend wants to perform possible data recovery before before any attempts to fix the hdd

anybody else have any advice?? thanks