Recently, I faced the same problem with a Sony XR-155 camcorder while being on vacation. Fortunately, I managed to recover my videos. First, make sure that you as little as possible to the hard drive in the camera menu, so I would not recommend to rebuild the image database or to reformat the drive.
Connect the camera to your PC in the same way that you would usually do. When I tried to access the drive in Windows Explorer, I got a message that the drive was not readable and needs formatting. You do NOT want to do that. I decided to make a full backup of the drive first, so that I could safely fiddle around later on.
The program that I used is Paragon Drive Backup. It gave me a few error messages during the back-up, which I all ignored, and after about 1.5 hours the copy was ready. The next step was to mount the image as to a free drive letter. I figured that I would need some kind of data recovery tool to extract the data, but to my surprise, the mounted disk image was readable in Windows Explorer as if no problem had ever occurred. Luckily, I was able to extract all of my videos from the camera in this way.
Of course I do not know for certain whether this technique also works in your case. For instance, it could be the case that the code E:31:00 is a generic HDD error message and therefore, it might be the case that your camera has a different problem than mine had. However, I think it is worth the shot to try to recover your data in this way (I assume Backup & Recovery 10 Suite does the same trick, a demo version is available on http://www.paragon-software.com/downloads/home/).
This procedure of course does not fix your camera (what I understand from various massages across the internet is that you should send it to Sony to get it repaired), but at least you might be able restore your data. I hope that you will be successful, good luck!
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