Laptop Hard Drive Diagnostics and Cloning

When this laptop started showing this message.

First I tried 

• Google: Fix for HP Error No Bootable Device Found / No Boot Device / Boot Device Not Found

The results were negative.  The laptop would still occasionally lose track of the hard drive.

    HP Notebook PCs – Boot Device Not Found Error or Hard Drive Not Detected – This document is for HP notebook computers with the HP Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) beginning in late 2008. 

Tried to back up using Acronis. Betore it would complete it would sometimes drop and show the same thing as above.  Other times Acronis would puke at a sector. See message below.  For the first few tries I restarted the whole backup process thinking that I could not afford to allow any errors.  Only later did I realize that the chances of the few errors being in critical places was low.  At that point I clicked IGNORE ALL and the process completed sucessfully.

 

Tried chkdisk. It would get through the chkdsk with repair.  It was slow but would make it through.  

Next I tried using Speedfan to move the pending sectors. 

• Wikipedia: SpeedFan
• Download SpeedFan

Ran SpeedFan: Showed 34 pending sectors.  

Tried defrag. It made it through one pass.  Went to bed. When I got up it had gone  numb again showing the above message.

Speedfan SMART report after defrag here  – Looked ominous

Ran SpeedFan again. Looked better than after defrag.

SpeedFan SMART report second run after defrag – showed 24 pending sectors. Looks like defrag cleared up 12 of the pending sectors 

Below are the SpeedFan SMART hard disk drive test results after I swapped in the new cloned hard drive.  There were no longer any "pending blocks" shown.

I looked at using DD_Rescue but that looked complicated and I already have Acronis installed.  I did not proceed with dd_rescue but here are the links:

• About dd_rescue
• Google: dd_rescue windows 7
• Cloning Hard Drives with ddrescue

Research Links

• SuperUser: How to force a remap of sectors reported in S.M.A.R.T C5 (Current Pending Sector Count)?

Summary of Results

This disk continued to degrade.   I was fortunate that I managed to get the disk backed up using Acronis and clicking on IGNORE ALL when an error popped up in Acronis.  The new clone seems to be working ok.