Hi, My laptop had become sluggish and disk used to make lot of noise recently. And, one day on bootup, I get: "SMART Disk Failure Imminent on Hard Disk 0". I took the backup and have recovered the laptop to factory settings. The laptop is fast, bootup and shutdown quick, no disk noise either. But I still get the same error/warning on boot. It could be genuine h/w prob and perhaps I will eventually have to buy a new internal disk. BUT I was wondering if you could suggest/advise some hard disk repair tools/methods or any other information on how to fix disk so that I dont get SMART warning anymore? Your reply is really appreciated. Thanks in Advance. cheers.

You can disable SMART in the BIOS options. Look here for more info on SMART. http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/smart-technology.html If the disk is still making noises you need to deal with it. You state the noises are gone but the warning is still present. There are drive fittness tests that can be run to see if this is a false warning or not. There could be legitimate reasons for SMART to report a problem that can be corrected. For instance, if the disk were accessed so often that it overheated, SMART may give a warning. This could be your current situation.

on some computers you can disable Smart disc in the BIOS/Setup so that it does not give you the warning. That does not mean the drive won't fail, it just stops it telling you that it's about to fail.

Just because you have recovered the laptop to factory settings does not mean that the HD status have improved. By design SMART is an early warning that alert you of the impending catrastrophy just like the Russian Air Controllers did. They warned the aircraft (packed with about 170 passengers among them 47 little ones) of the impending lighting and adverse weather condition not once but TWICE. The pilot chosen to ignore them and guess what 170 life is lost. Don't take your chances. i_XpUser

Personally I do not trust SMART. But if I were you, I would run the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostica and also chkdsk /r. If you get more than a handful of errors on chkdsk /r, I woyuld trash the drive. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

... the last SMART warning I received, the drive - while not failing completely - went on to develop 1000+ bad clusters (before I stopped trying to recover) toast Saying that XP is the most stable MS OS is like saying that asparagus is the most articulate vegetable

http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm