Hard drive self test unsuccessful – status=7

Cannot get to recovery... system fails to get that far. Also cannot boot from win7 DVD.. it hangs.

Acronis can see the disk, and 'successfully' restored track0 & recovery partition (form external backup) but this does not change the boot error. I suspect its indeed a disk hardware failure - annoying as this is a WD BLACK hard drive that was just installed brand new two months ago! ( replaced proactively because previous samsung drive was reporting "impending failure" in its SMART diagnostics...)

Status: 0xc000000e

Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

You could try to run chkdsk from Windows Recovery Environment & check if the issue persists.

However I think the drive is physically BAD.

Follow the steps from this link to boot into Windows Recovery Environment and open the command prompt.

What are the system recovery options in Windows 7?

a) Right click on cmd.exe in the Program list and then select the option Run as administrator.

Note: If you are prompted for an administrator password or for confirmation, type your password, or click Continue.

b) In the command prompt window, Type in the commands listed below i.e. (/f, /r, /i, /c).

 In the command prompt, type chkdsk or chkdsk C: followed by one or a combination of switches listed below and press Enter.

 Type One of these Commands to Run Chkdsk:

i. /f = The /f switch is the most common of the chkdsk switches. It tells chkdsk to try and fix any errors it finds.

ii. /r = The /r switch tells chkdsk to attempt to recover any bad sectors of the hard drive if any are found. A bad sector is a spot on the hard drive that cannot hold saved data anymore. (See screenshot below)

iii. /i = The /i switch tells chkdsk to perform a less detailed but faster disk check. (See screenshot below)

iv. /c = The /c switch tells chkdsk to skip the checking of cycles within a folder structure which reduces the scan time.

 Note: During the restart process, Windows checks the disk for errors, and then Windows starts.

HDD is failing....back up data ASAP and replace HDD. If still under warranty then contact Dell

en.community.dell.com/.../19520860.aspx

Fortunately, if you bought the drive at retail, it has a 5-year warranty - run the WD diagnostics on the drive and report the error to WD and they'll replace the drive.