Thank you for all of your answers. It has taken me some time to respond because I have been traveling, but also because it has been quite a challenge to sort this all out with a great deal of confusing and conflicting information. I will take this a piece at a time. Please be aware, I am familiar to some extent with all of this, but no expert. I look forward to any suggestions on where I have done something wrong.
Patio – I had tried to use the diagnostics for HGST earlier. When I open WinDFT, the program they suggest here
https://www.hgst.com/support/hard-drive-support/downloads, no drives appear on the list. Then I find at places like this
https://www.lifewire.com/windows-drive-fitness-test-review-2624565 and others who say that test can't scan the hard drive that Windows was installed to. Which means, I assume I can't use it for my hard drive. So – I then went looking for other options. Also – I don't believe I paid for PartitionGuru. I think I am using a free version. Why don't you like that as an apt?
DaveLembke – I used crystaldiskinfo last night and again this morning. Last night I panicked. The Health Status was Red - Bad. The only item on the list that was bad was the first one – Read Error Rate. I did some investigating on that and saw something somewhere about that not being a critical item. I was going to find that information again today to see what that means. However, when I just ran the test this morning, the Health Status shows Blue – Good!! with the Read Error Rate showing what appears to be appropriate numbers.
As I said, I went looking for other free diagnostic tools and found several lists of options. From them I choose and did:
HD Tune
http://www.hdtune.com/. The Error Scan appears to be similar to PartitionGuru, but only gives two options – OK and Damaged. Mine was all OK. You will note my PartitionGuru results also said none of the sectors were damaged, but they appear to be declining in quality. According to the HDTUNE web site, the free version (which I downloaded) was supposed to include the Health (S.M.A.R.T) option, but when I click on that tab it just says “Health Status n/a” at the bottom.
SeaTools for Windows by Seagate I ran the Long Generic Scan and passed.
As mentioned in my original post, I also did a diagnostic through Dell and my hard drive passed.
So – where does this leave me??? My hard drive seems to be passing tests. I still get the message that “Windows detected a hard disk problem” which apparently some people just find an irritant and find ways to stop the message from showing up. On PartitionGuru it would appear that the quality of my sectors is declining and I did have one damaged sector which I repaired.
Then, there is one new problem. I have now been getting an error message from Intel Rapid Storage Technology that says “your system is reporting one or more events and data may be at risk.” And then issues with the disk at Port 0. When I follow that I get the option to “reset disk to normal” which I have now done several times. When I have looked online to try to figure out what this means, most of what I read suggests my hard drive is failing. If my hard drive is failing, my plan is to buy a new computer. I would like to do that before this one fails so I can have an easier transition. My big question is how fast should I move, or in DaveLembke's language, how quickly if I do have a cancer, is this cancer likely to be spreading?
Rob