The collision problem according to my search comes form clone jobs duplicating info for
a targe HD. This sends the Target HD "offline." Diskpart can change the uniqueid commands
to edit the hex number of the drive.

OK for all that.

I got as far as changing the uniqueid to get past the conflict by changing one letter at the
end of the given hex string. The target then shows "online" in diskpart.

Just now that target drive seems to go into checkdisk-- the long form version-- but still has boot errors after all that checking or errors when trying to have it used again as the target.

Is there an answer for all this twiddling or is the HD just hosed? It always shows good health with formated in Win7. My equipment is old. This Seagate is taking a lot of punishment. :-/

SMART the drive.

Thanks for answering.

Can I Smart the drive with the Low Level Format tool which shows the option to run smart?

Or run Victoria which I remember from times past on the forum here.

just saying, see the time stamp from my previous entry and see the one at this posting. The flyby of data being moved and etc is still going on. Frankly I don't know if it started over by I pretty much doubt that. I did not give any command on this to f/r/x for this run. It just sort of began going on it best I can recall.

How can the drive report in good health after such a thrumming?

cheers.

It eventually finished.

I haven't run diskpart to see if all that rewriting changed back the uniquid or something. Why is such a procedure given anywhere if it crashes the HD regardless of the uiniquid?

--> Attached is the Smart report I got off of Low Level Format option from the format tool.
(paid version :) )

I screwed up by hot plugging the HD with all this changing over so prob'ly needs another wipe.

On the previous clone job Norton Ghost 11.50 (I think) stopped during the run giving some 'unknown problem encountered' response. IOW everything looked ok for the clone job and then Norton hung up.

I'm short HD's with the bad cluster found on another HD discussed in my previous question.

I can't really re-invest my whole drive stock with SSDs on the PCs in my home ethernet setup. That's six minimum.

Thanks for any advice.

Just a followup for this perplexing problem.

The screen shot shows the diskpart statistics for ther Source and Target drive.
I had changed the last letter to "B" in the uniqueid procedure seen elsewhere to avoid the collision. After the long run of check disk, the drive id was changed back. Where would chkdsk
even find such a thing?

The result is that in admin tools the target drive once again shows "offline"

What is doubly odd about this is the source drive in this case was not a Seagate but a West. Digital. (I use the clone function quite a bit.)