After a recent complete NTFS reformat of my HDD to reinstall Windows XP, I've been running into some problems when booting up. The normal splash screen displays at the start (a standard Intel P4 with Hyper Threading Technology one), however the system stalls at this point for some time. After a minute or so, a DOS screen is displayed that says something like Master Drive - S.M.A.R.T command failed. Press <F4> to continue. When i do this, a black screen is displayed, or sometimes a disk read error message CTRL + ALT + DELETE to restart message. The only workaround I can find to this is booting to my XP cd and doing one of two things. a) go into recovery console, boot my HDD (which is detected in XP installation) and then restart b) go to install windows XP, examine my drive, then decline the license agreement to restart the computer I find this a bit wierd, as the XP installation software appears to detect my hardware, while S.M.A.R.T does not. My HDD is only two years old and had been working perfectly prior to formatting. Everything is still on backup from my install, so formatting again is not a problem if required. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Your drive appears to be failing. Download free diagnostics from the manufacturer's site to find out for sure.

thanks for the help. i have a western digital 120GB 7200rpm drive. upon downloading their diagnostic tool, i ran a quick test on the drive and it returned the following: Test Option: QUICK TEST Model Number: WDC WD1200JD-00FYB0 Serial Number: WD-WMAEK1939368 Firmware Number: 200.D520 Drive Type: SATA Capacity: 120.03 GB SMART Status: FAIL Test Result: PASS Test Time: 14:27:14, March 11, 2006

I would start shopping. That drive cannot be trusted.

If you bought the drive new it has a three year warranty. You can go to the Western Digital web site, get an RMA, ship the drive to them and have a replacement drive for whatever you are willing to pay for shipping (the faster the shipping the more it costs you). You can probably also have them ship a new drive to you, then you send the defective one back (you must use supply a credit card number in that case), but the shipping charges (for quick shipping, no option)are higher. However, the replacement drive will only have the remaider of your warranty period.

HD manufacturers does not replace defective HD under warranty with a brand-new</i) HD. Instead, they replace it with a refurbished HD. i_XpUser