It hasn't failed...yet. I have replaced/added drives on desktops. Laptop...nope. Call to my tech guru has been made.
They do make kits that will use a laptop internal drive and make it a standard USB external drive. If you do this, you might be able to recover the data and possibly even the drive, depending on what is wrong. (P.S. This also allows you to analyze the drive when it is NOT running your operating system.)
If I was in your position (and I have been with desktop drives), the very first thing I would do before even trying to analyze the drive is to get everything of value off of it first (using option above). "Move" the data files to a different drive. Don't use the Copy/Paste. By using the Move command, you will know what was successfully moved because it will only be removed from the old drive after it was successfully placed on the new drive. If you use Copy/Paste/Delete and the operation fails, you would have to manually compare old and new drives to see where the failure occurred and which files didn't make it.
When doing this move, take the files in reasonably small chunks. Do just one directory at a time unless it is a large directory. If it's large, take a dozen or two files at a time until the directory is empty. If you keep getting errors while moving a particular directory, then you might have to move one file at a time until you can identify which file was causing the actual failure.
After you have removed everything you can, then you can try to analyze or repair the drive. With fewer files on the drive there will be a better chance of getting it repaired unless it is a hardware failure. Keep in mind that some data problems can be so significant that they leave symptoms of being hardware failures.
Even if the drive does get fully repaired and appears to function, I would still be cautious of trusting it. Go ahead and use it as the main drive, but be prepared for it to fully fail in such a way that nothing can be recovered (i.e. keep backups of critical data).