For 4 days straight, on start-up, i've gotten this message..

"Smart failure predicted on primary master. WARNING: Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent"

But now that message hasn't shown up and everything seems to be running normal..

Is this part of the 'dying hard-drive' process? =X

or.. something else?

Please shed some light on this =(
Thanks!

Download a diagnostic tool from the harddrive maker and run some tests. Just be careful which tests you run as some are data-destructive.
If the tests reveal any problems then do as SMART advised.

I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

Smart reporting of errors is deliberately "dumbed down" so as to not make any particular manufacturer's drive look bad (minor errors are not reported), so when you DO get reports of errors, it almost always means you hard drive IS starting to fail.
You can turn off Smart reporting in most bioses, but that doesn't make the problem go away - the errors are still being recorded on the hard drive. The whole purpose of Smart is to give you some time to rescue what data you can befire the drive fails completely.

There are usually two non-destructive tests - a short or quick one, and a longer one. Run both.

Also see the latter part of response 1 in this:
http://www.computing.net/windows95/...