Hello John

Thank you for your suggestions. In addition, I would also like to thank others on this list for their suggestions.

It has beena week or 2 since I posed my original question.

Later that day, a friend came round and after I told him my problem, he said that he had the Ontrac data recovery software on his system. I took the drive out of the particular computer and, along with that hard drive, an additional USB hard drive and a USB 2.5/3.5 inch docking station we went to his house.

Please note: the latest version of the Ontrac Data Recovery software, is not accessible to any screen reading software. I tried it before my friend came to my house.

Once he had run the Ontrac software and performed a scan on the troublesome hard drive, to my enormous relief and enormous good luck, he was able to recover all the data on the drive and copy it to the spare hard drive. The software, did report some problems with some sectors on the drive, fortunately, there was no data in those sectors.

When I got home, I reinstalled the hard drive in the computer. As the hard drive is a Western Digital hard drive, I downloaded and installed their Data Lifeguard software.

As I had all the data from the drive stored on another drive. I decided to choose the option to write zeros to the entire drive, in effect, returning the drive to the state it was in when I purchased it. The function completed successfully, with no errors.

Once that was done, I used the windows Disk Management utility, to initialize, partition and format the drive.

I then used CHKDSK, with the /f switch, to check the drive. It came back with no errors.

I restarted the computer and used CHKDSK, with the /F switch again, and again, the program came back with no errors.

I restored the data from the backup drive to the original drive. So, everything is back to normal.

I will check the drive regularly to check reliability.