It's a laptop that sits on a desk and I am using the original power block and has original PS in the laptop.
The Win8 install was updating itself when I sat down to watch a football game (NFL), will try and recover the other HDD in an external enclosure and try and determine cause.
It did have a late of disk errors, which I would run repairs on.
Once a disk start showing bad sectors, it's always a good idea to ditch it and start afresh - did you try running CHKDSK /R to see what it had to say?
After the last check disk repair ran is when the laptop stopped recognizing it on the restart.
May not have time to play with it again until the weekend, long 12-13 hour work days right now
Thanks for the hints. I may have overstated that this laptop caused all these drives to fail. I think it was one in this laptop and one each in two others over the last 6 years. As long as I stay up to date on backups I guess it is not abad thing to do a fresh install every few years, cleans out the clutter. It is just that if I don't have a disk with all the SP or if there has been no SP in a while installing and updating can be a pain. I can do this, I just don't do it so often that I am good at it!
I was going to buy a small SSD but I hear they are prone to failure too. And I have had a Toshiba, Samsung, Seagate, WD and Hitachi all fail on me (many machines over 10-12 years, but still looking for the most reliable) 4200, 5400 and 7200 RPM, doesn't seem to matter
That does sound like the death-knell of the disk- that's one reason why backups are so important.
Good luck with the rebuild!
Thought I should close this. Gave up on trying to fix the Win7 problem. Did a restore with the ASUS restore disk courtesy of the Geek Squad at Best Buy. The old disk seems fried, did the install on a reliable 160GB HDD. Went as smooth as possible. Did an Ubuntu/Linux install on another spare drive. It had issues doing a quick format, did a regular format and after a few hours it was good to go.
Hope to recover the original HDD contents by using an external enclosure,Linux and a frozen HDD.
Last resort. BTW,the Ubuntu install went very well, it is an option for an internet, basic machine
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