I have legacy mode enabled in the BIOS to work with this OS. I reseated the hard drive and that didn't work. Now I get the warnings as described at the beginnnig of this post. Since the warranty was up, I bought a new hard drive and switched to Ubuntu Linux (from Windows 8.1) The badblocks command found thousands of bad blocks on that drive, so I replaced it. I replaced the drive because I got what I thought were real Hard Drive warnings from the SMART check upon startup.
Though from Gparted it did tell me that the block size is 2048 and linux thinks it is 512 I booted from live usb in Ubuntu to text the hard drive and found no bad blocks by using the badblocks command. Short DST: Not available (When I run the long test, it says Long DST: Not available) When I run the test (both Quick and Extensive) I get a similar error:
To ensure data loss, please backup the content immediately and run the Hard Disk Test is System Diagnostics. The SMART hard disk check has detected an imminent failure.
