Acer Aspire 551 :: I / O Error With Recovery

During restore using Acer recovery disks for this Acer aspire 551, the recovery stalls at the final step where the wim file is written to the c: drive.  It gives me an i/o error.

I suspect that the disk is functional because I have run the cmd.exe program from the x:drive and then run both scndsk.exe and scndsk.exe /F to fix any errors.  No errors were detected.

However, any fix for this error that I have encountered suggests replacing the hardrive. This seems to be inappropriate, in this case.

I should also say that I have used dos commands to copy a file from the system32 directory to the c: drive successfully suggesting that there is no problem with writing to the disk.

Lastly, the cd rom hardware must be working or the disks would not be successfully read to the final stage.  How this can be an i/o error eludes me.