Sometimes a hard disk drive will show errors because the filesystem on it, NTFS for example, has some internal inconsistencies. Running the command ‘chkdsk /f’ will usually fix these relatively minor problems. However, sometimes the errors are more serious, such as ‘File record segment 1204 is unreadable.’ These physical errors can occasionally be fixed using the command ‘chkdsk /r’, but usually indicate that the hard disk drive is failing and needs to be replaced.
If the hard disk drive is the one from which Windows boots, and the boot partition is affected by a lot of physical errors, you might end up with an unbootable system. In this case, the best thing you can do is try to recover the user data then scrap the affected hard disk drive, after using a utility such as DBAN to destroy any data that might otherwise be readable. Some people might try to reformat the hard disk drive at the lowest possible level in an attempt to make it usable again, but I would never trust a hard disk drive with any valuable data after it had developed enough errors to make Windows unbootable.
If you treat your computers quite roughly, the replacement for the failed hard disk drive should be either a shock-proof model or a solid-state drive, which has no moving parts. If you treated the failed hard disk drive with due care, and it was not that old when it failed, consider getting a different make as its replacement. As always, I would not like to say anything negative about any specific make, although I can say on a positive note that Crucial and Toshiba products are usually very reliable, and Western Digital make some excellent devices as well.
Details of SMART attributes can be found at https://kb.acronis.com/content/9636.
Dell PC diagnostics can be run from https://www.dell.com/support/Diagnostics/uk/en/ukdhs1.
To fix Dell recovery partition problems, see http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore.
Details of how to fix PBR descriptor alerts can be found at http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/fixdesc.shtml.
Manufacturer-specific hard disk drive testing utilities can be found at http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287.
If you use the usual drag-and-drop facilities of Windows to copy data from one hard disk drive to another, it can mysteriously stop part way through if it comes across an error. Sometimes it is easier to open a command prompt and use ‘xcopy’ instead.
Like many command-line programs from the days of MS-DOS, ‘xcopy’ takes a ridiculously large number of parameters. However, the ones you will usually need are ‘/E /C /H /K’. Here is an example showing how to copy the contents of a user account from an external hard disk drive that has been removed from a broken system to the hard disk drive on a new system: ‘xcopy "F:\Documents and Settings\Users\Joe" C:\RecoveredAccount /E /C /H /K’.
An alternative to ‘xcopy’ is ‘robocopy’, which has even more possibilities. One good thing about ‘robocopy’ is that it can retain all the timestamps, i.e. the ‘created’, ‘modified’, and ‘accessed’ times for each file.