Has anyone seen this message before?

[jazzyjace]

Hi there,

I'm a newbie and had no luck in getting answers and thought you guys/girls could assist me

Problem: My friend has an HP 473.uk Pavilion model from 2003. His douche bag of a cousin lost the original recovery disc for the system when it required formatting. Today, I learned that his Sygate firewall was disabled for 7 months and never told me. My alarm bells started to ring as I saw his PC was very slow in starting up/closing down. I formatted his PC with an XP Pro disc and during the reboot phases, it came up with this message:
Primary master hard disk S.M.A.R.T. Status bad. WARNING: Immediate back-up of your data & replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

Can you believe this message appears when the PC is booted-up (but no Windows Welcome logo at this stage) and the F1 & F2 prompts appear as well. When I select F2 it waits to boot-up from a disc!!! I have now formatted it twice and yes, you've guessed it, there are now 2 OS on the PC and won't allow me to progress further! What can be done? Is this a software problem as opposed to what that message suggests?

[Monty007]

Oh no this may be bad I would say SMART is enabled on your pc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.
Back up all your personal files.
After that in a command prompt type in chkdsk /f

[jazzyjace]

Mmm, thank you but can you tell me if I need to format the whole PC again? It is 5 years old...

[Disk_Contented]

The short of it is, you need a new hard drive.
As Monty said, save any data that you can't replace. Do it quickly before its too late.
Or make an image of the HD now, and transfer that to the new HD.

[shaunak.it]

Hi,
Basically SMART stands for Smart Monitoring And Report Tool. Which continuousely monitors your hard disk drive for any problems. Its a software, but its burned in your PC's motherboards ROM. So unlike Windows, there is little chance that it will goof up . So as advised, better back up your drive before its too late.