On 10/24/2017 8:47 PM, Paul wrote:

If the owner has valuable data on it, back up first,
before charting a course of action. The temptation
to run CHKDSK is probably overpowering, but see if
you can back it up first.

Â*Â* Paul

I discovered the hard way that Win8.x disregards CHKDSK (!), and SMART
eventually killed the drive's boot sectors with a similar experience as
Mayayana's. So, it may be that if the notebook drive is old enough that
SMART was relatively "new", it may not be 100% compatible with Win8.x,
either. I booted the computer from a Linux thumb drive to get what I
needed off of it and one of these days will install Linux on it, since
the drive appears to be otherwise OK.

--
best regards,

Neil