Hi guys, posting this to share and maybe figure out how this happened, and avoid the same thing.

I have an old Latitude XT with a 120 gb 1.8 Samsung pata/zip, running Vista Professional. Last May it started BSODing, and running chkdsk showed errors every time. I could tell before it BSOD'd because the HD light flickered funny, kinda weak like Vista was having trouble reading. I created a Hiren's 15.2 disc, and a vistaPE disc, ran various utilities, until finally I "think" the bad/poor sectors were saved by Drevitalize 1.2. I replaced the drive anyway with a brand new sealed OEM Drive (Samsung), but was not too pleased with what *its* SMART reported on the new drive. Restored my Macrium clone image (full 120 gb clone file, no compression) to the new drive, everything worked fine until...

Fast forward to this month (BTW, laptop has always been left on 24/7/365). Started BSOD-ing again, SMART said the drive was bad, and a boot would not hold over 30 minutes without a BSOD, even after running chkdsk /f /r /b.

Soooo, after a complete chkdsk via VistaPE, booting to Hiren's MiniXP, checking with Victoria, running drevitalize 3.1 to fix 4 bad sectors, then verifying those sectors with victoria, then cloning the drive with Macrium PE (never booted back to C:) as chkdsk showed no more errors. This time I cloned it so the file was only 85 GB.

I then booted back to VistaPE and ran a full format, chkdsk-ed after, perfect! Booted back to Hiren's MiniXP and again verified the drive with chkdsk, victoria, Drevitalize, still perfect!

So I proceeded to do a clean restore of the Macrium Image. After about 11 hours and 3/4 complete, it failed.

Now, all HD utilities show the whole drive is trashed, Victoria and drevitalize show bad sectors starting at sector 0 and as long as I keep them running, all the sectors are reported as unreadable. I cannot low-level format, none of the OEM HD Manufacturer Drive utilities work although the SMART data is the same as before the crash. MiniXP removed Drive C and the drive does not show up at all in XP's disc management. Only my usb 1.5TB seagate with 3 primary partitions show up in both Explorer and disc management.

Can someone clue me in as to what happened?

I still have the drevitalize (DOS) "fixed" drive original to this machine to throw back in, but definitely don't want another catastrophe when I restore the newer clone image just in case Macrium PE or my cloning/restore choices trashed the newer drive.

I have a mirror/clone of the C: drive in my 1.5TB seagate made last May when I tried to boot off it. (the same 120gb image file written on it as the then new Samsung 120 after I received it)

Drive died. use new drive.