Hard Disk Error Win 8 help

Hello,


Drive capacity is 500GB SATA laptop size hdd

There is only ONE physical hard drive, with two partitions C: D:

The D: is a System reinstall partition. As many name brands have now days.

I went to the device manager and grabbed this Hard disk info.

Device SCSI\Disk&Ven_Hitachi&Prod_HTS545050A7E380\4&3a8b99fd&0&000000 was configured.

I figure this is the important information about the drive type - make.

SCSI\Disk&Ven_Hitachi&Prod_HTS545050A7E380

(SATA HDD)

I also noted in device manager, where I got the drive info, the hard drive has write caching enabled.

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I was away from a Windows 8 HP made computer which is approximately 2 1/2 years old, for several hours. When I returned, there was a windows notification on screen, which basically said.

Hard disk needs to be backed up, because it has an issue and is seemingly going to fail.

It was not a "blue screen of death" notification. No error codes to list.

I closed this Hard drive issue warning, approximately 10 minutes later it randomly reappeared, for the second time.

I hadn't just clicked to open a program or anything, when the second notification occurred, so like opened a particular user initiated program.

So what do I do from here as first steps? To decide if it needs to be replaced or there is another fix?

Other info:-

There are no other Hard drives connected externally.

A worst case scenario / solution, would be to somehow clone my 500GB existing hard drive with the issue, to the 1TB I have on my TV which I use for recording TV.

These two drives are not same brand or size so, If I have to resort to this last ditch effort.

I would need a free program that isn't going to have an issue with these size and make differences. I have read some cloning software can have issues with this, in online posts.

Thanks for your support in this.

 

Major Attitude recommended Macrium Reflect. I Use AOMEI Backupper and have never had an issue with either cloning or imaging/restoring.