I have a gateway m-1625 laptop. I turned it on the other day and got a SMART Failure Predicted on Hard Disk 4 error. Press F1 to continue. When I press F1, i get 2 options: to launch startup repair, or to start windows normally. Windows won't start normally, and when i do the start up repair, i get a blue screen that says Session3_Initialization_Failed. I have an option to press F8 to start in Safe mode, but that doesn't work.
I am not a computer expert, but I do know my way around fixing things. Anyone that has any idea on how to get me back into windows will be a life saver.
Thanks in advance

Do not take a Smart Failure lightly. Smart failure is telling you your hard drive is almost dead. You may have to go into the BIOS and set IGNORE ERRORS or something like that. You may be able to disable SMART also. That may buy you enough time to get another drive. You must save any data you need immediately. The drive has already partially failed and very soon may not boot at all.

You could try a linux livecd like Puppy linux to back your data up if you can or you could try moving the hard drive to another pc with an adapter and save data that way.

SRX660

SMART should be taken as a guide. It is not the be-all-and-end-all of the status of a drive. It's perfectly possible to have a drive that flags up as being SMART failure out of the box and it'll last four years. There's no set standard for SMART and what's seen as critical on one drive is normal for another.

That being said, back-ups are always a good idea since mechanical bits like the hard drive do not last forever and your symptoms would suggest an issue with your drive.