No idea what the error message means but I have had recent experience with failed hard drive, two members of my family had problems. One with a failed RAID 0 array too.
Managed both times to get the stuff off the hard drives and onto new media.
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/ - Is something I haven't used but comes with everything, and more, of what I did use on my Ubuntu live USB key. Had to install it all myself though, whereas this comes with it.
You should be able to check, with the software included, the health of the drive.