18 month old HP Pavillion Elite HPE 163UK. Running a routine scan I have a SMART failure HD521-2W

[OriginalBiggles]

Seeing this error I borrowed a spare 500gb WD drive. I tried to clone this drive using WD (Acronis) software. This failed and left me with a corrupt Windows 7(64 bit). Having restored this, Norton's was not working and I was missing 5 of the USB ports. I have restored this back to a working system.

Strange thing happened, in testing the spare drive it also reports a HD521-2w error. It originally passed when installed.

Do I have two faulty drives or is this a glitch in the testing?

The BIOS is version 5.15 which I believe I updated recently along with other drivers just before this error started.

I have also run CHKDSK on the original 1.5Tb drive which only reports one 4kb faulty sector.

Can anyone suggest another test of the hard drive, if not what is the best software ( not Acronis which gave me a big problem to restore the PC back to a working system) to clone the original hard drive?

Late news I have run Acronis (not the WD version) and I get the same corrupted Windows 7.

Bob

[Big_Dave]

Hi,

Acronis is considered to be one of the leading hard drive imaging products on the market.  I use Paragon Hard Disk Manager Suite Pro (complementary)  but I can't say that it will work any better than Acronis in your particular situation.

Does the hardware diagnostics still report errors.

Hard drives from the factory often have bad sectors and hence the reason why manufacturers set up sector bypass tables on the hard drive.

Go to the hard drive manufacturer's web site and see if there is a firmware update for the hard drive.  Look for posted issues against the particular model of HD that you are using.

Try a different motherboard SATA port (change the boot order in the bios if required) and a known good SATA data cable.

It's possible that you have two bad hard drives unless you know for certain that the borrowed hard drive is good.

Another thing to consider is using the Windows restore point process to bring your PC back to a date before the errors occured and before your recent software updates.

You could also try the following:

Open up the RUN window and enter the following commands:

cmd

sfc /scannow    ---> note the space between the c and the /       This will scan the critical system files and attempt repairs.