I burned Samsung's Hutil .iso file to a bootable CD and ran the program on my Samsung hard disk. It provides details of all error locations but not what files are stored there. It found ecc errors at sectors in the beginning of the disk. It's sugggestion was for me to backup all files and erase the disk. Then, to run Hutil again and restore files if successful.
It didn't provide me a way to restore the files. A clone of the disk image would only cause the errors to return as I see it. I tried to update the operating system from Vista 64bit to Windows 7 64bit to make it easier to clone if possible but the update failed because it detects corrupted dll files on the disk it needs for the update. If I replace the drive with a SSD, it will need Windows 7 or higher.
It looks like I am going to have to do a laborious install of all the hardware drivers and individual applications that I am now using. In addition I will need to extract all Network and Email account details for the reconstruction. I use a cable modem and network a number of other computers. If you know of a utility that will help me extract all these details in an organized fashion from the disk drive before I erase it, it would be appreciated.
The hard drive runs well most of the time. The type of faults I get are: occasional shut down of windows explorer, occasional shut down of the web browser, and the network connection to the modem is sometimes lost. It manages to do very long system checks without interruption and I have not had problems with moving 100's of gigabytes of data. All of my message work here and my emails are being done with this same hard disk. I recently did a disk defragmentation and it helped the speed somewhat. Two files it could not defrag were WindowsUpdate.log and WMITracking.log which are probably located at the front of the address space that is suspect.