Hard drive running Mavericks issue

Hi

This is my first time posting on the forum and I'm not that a techphile so please excuse my terminology!

I was having some issues shutting down my laptop one time (was just hanging) so I gave it a hard boot (which I've done before). When it started back up the next day, I wasn't able to bootup and got a message saying it couldn't recognize my HD and I could try and repair it using disk utility (which didn't work) or I had to wipe it clean and use my Mavericks boot disk (which I don't have as I d/l off the internet).

I purchased a SATA adapter and have tried to connect the macbook HD to my iMac, which is also not recognizing it. When I go to disk utility it can't repair it.

My question is could the the problem be that my iMac runs lion and the MCP runs mavericks and that's why the HD isn't being recognized? Could it be because my MBP HD is larger than the iMacs? Or is my MBC HD just FUBAR and needs to be wiped? (I have recent photos from a trip to Europe that I was hoping to retrieve).

Thanks
Sadie

Yep I did. I opened disk utility and it showed
HD 320.00 Hitachi HTS723232L9SA62 - which was fine, or 'ok'

The sub HD is disk0s2 which cannot be completely verified and gave the message Error: disk utility can't repair disk, back up as many files as possible and reformat disk

The OS X base system HD below these is also ok.