OK I've hit the point where I think I've finished.
- I cloned the restored drive on two additional 1TB drives just so I could perform additional test.
- I restored from my Acronis True Image backup the "C" partion which put the system back at the point I encountered all of the issues.
- One of the applications I had installed was Hard Disk Sentinal (see http://www.hdsentinel.com/) which runs anytime the system is running and reports on the hard drive health. Much to my surprise the HD I had installed had only 249 days of life remaining per HDS. Thus I was back at the starting point of the original failure and it was on to one of the cloned drives which of course required that I again run True Image. After TI ran all looked OK.
- I then updated my Kaspersky antivirus and Malware Bytes to ensure all were at the latest level.
- As a fallback measure I used TI to clone the drive to a 1TB drive. This will give me a base starting point in the event the current drive fails (per HDS the life is greater than 1000 days).
- BTW much of the slow recovery was due to USB 2. I could have performed the task MUCH faster on my desktop which has USB 3 ports but I have all of my USB enclosures tied up. BTW I'm replacing all of my single drive external USB enclosures with the Thermaltake ST0020U Steel Mesh & Ruggedized Plastic 3.5" Black USB 3.0 Max 5G External Enclosure. I've been testing with two of them and I'm super pleased with the data transfer speed and the drive temp. Neither drive is higher then 84 degrees F. In my super cooled tower one drive runs at 91 degrees F and another runs at 90 degrees F. When I get more of the Thermaltake enclosures as a test I'll remove the two drives and install them in the external enclosure and see if the drive temp is better. FYI on my laptop I have two USB 2 enclosures connected and the drives in them are running at 106 degrees F. Thus the Thermaltake cooling is MUCH better!
- The HD temp in the All-In-One is far from optimun, currently it is running at 111 degrees F. IMHO HP had done a poor job with the design of this unit.
Because I have three other PCs demanding my attention I've hit the point where enough is enough with this system and will be returning it to my mother.
Much thanks for the help!!!