today when i turned on the puter it never loaded up, instead i got an error message saying "primary smart drive status bad, warning imediatly back up your data, a failure may be imminent" at the bottom it says "f1 to continue delete to enter setup" it will not do either. is every thing lost to a crashed hd or is there something i can do?

SMART (Self Monitoring, Analysis & Reporting Tool) is used to give warning to the user that the hard disk is either OK or about to fail so that you can take immediate action to back up the data that's on it before it fails completely. Your best course of action now is to buy and install a new hard disk and put Windows on it. Install the failing disk as a 'slave' secondary disk and see if you can access it in My Computer on the new Windows installation. If Windows won't read the disk I fear it's too far gone and any data on it is lost.

It's because hard disks can fail at any time that a sensible PC user should keep backups of all their documents and other files on another disk or on CD/DVD.

This post has been edited by pip22: Dec 10 2007, 08:17 AM