Hard Drive Causing Backup Error Messages

This post is to relay my experience in trying to solve backup errors occurring during system and file backups. Hopefully, my experience may help someone else who has reached the point of frustration in trying to perform a successful backup. The machine is an Intel based laptop with an i7 CPU running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and a 750 GB, 7200 RPM drive. In January of this year I began receiving error messages during my normal backup sessions. My first reaction was to think the errors were being caused by a change in software. Windows updates, new software installations and malware all with the potential of causing errors. All of the backup fix recommendations provided on various forums and support sites including Microsoft's dealing with backup related error messages were performed to no avail. Of particular note running CHKDSK reported a few fixes and DISK MANAGEMENT reported drive C: was healthy but backup continued to fail. More on this later. My next attempt was to start from scratch, reinstalling the system and user files. Needless to say the reinstall from the recovery disk put the machine back to "OEM" settings. The system and user files were reinstalled, updated and appeared to be working normally so I ran backup. You guessed it, backup failed. To protect my user files I used ROBOCOPY for backup and just about gave up trying to make a system backup. Sometime later as I was working a message window popped up stating a scheduled hardware scan was going to begin in 10 minutes. Fortunately, the reinstall turned on PC Doctor which came preinstalled from the OEM. At some point in time I had turned the scan off to continue working on something and forgot to turn it back on. I let the hardware scan run and to my surprise the scan reported that the hard drive was failing. To confirm this situation I went to the drive manufacturer's website to download their diagnostic tool. The drive actually continued failing during the diagnostic test. Solution to the backup errors was to replace the hard drive. Lessons learned: 1. Do not assume backup errors are caused by software. Don't depend totally upon CHKDSK to determine the status of your hard drive. Download the manufacture's diagnostic tool and test your drive before going through all of the frustrations encountered when trying to find a software solution. The diagnostic tools are easy to download, not large and fairly user friendly. Some of the tests take a while to run with the time dependent upon the size of your drive. Running the diagnostic tool will quickly determine if your hard drive is healthy. 2. Take notice of physical changes which may be occurring. My laptop has the hard drive tucked away in the lower left hand corner of the case. It's location appears to provide little air flow if any so the drive runs warm when usage is high. At the time, not knowing the drive's location, I wasn't sure what was causing the heating of this surface area. Just prior to the backup errors occurring the surface above the drive was getting hot to the point of irritating the palm of my left hand. If your machine is a laptop with high drive usage, as is mine, maybe a failing drive is causing backup errors. My laptop, 2-1/2 years old with 11,000+ hours on the OEM drive, failed due to overheating. The new drive is from a different manufacture but I suspect this drive will also fail in the not too distant future due to a really bad case design. To keep your sanity you need to have a good system backup. Although time consuming a full system backup does make it easy to install a new drive. I was lucky to have one.