Turned out it isn’t the hard drive which is dying – it’s the internal second drive bay! I switched another hard drive into the bay, and that started to have the same problems immediately and that’s how I knew plus a few times Disk Management couldn’t even see the hard drive, and sometimes when it did, it couldn’t initialize it.

Luckily I have have two hard drive bays in my laptop and the Windows OS + programs hard drive bay and hard drive itself are working normally, it’s just the other one with the additional (my main) hard drive bay that is malfunctioning. Now that I’ve removed the hard drive from that bay my laptop seems to be back to its normal self. But my laptop is 10 years old this year, and we had been planning with my Mom for her to buy me a new laptop as my 50th birthday present towards the end of the year anyway, so it’s really good that was already in the plans! And it’s really good there’s no terrible hurry *knock on wood* but it’ll behoove us to grab a new laptop sooner rather than later if there’s a nice sale suddenly or something!

I hooked up that removed main internal hard drive with all my stuff to my USB station, and run checks on it and it’s perfect, no problems or errors at all!

Now that my laptop only has the SSD hard drive which doesn’t have nearly enough space for all my stuff, I’m going to have to keep my main hard drive hooked up via USB hub until the new laptop. Which requires an external power source and a table or a stool to place it on close to my laptop and couch, and cords running around, it’s going to be more inconvenient to get to my files but I’m just glad I didn’t lose anything ✨✨