Since yesterday, each time I reboot my PC I get the following message right after the BIOS:
"WARNING: Dell's Disk Monitoring System has detected that drive 0 on the primary EIDE controller (the system drive) is operating outside of normal specifications. It is advisable to immediately backup your data and replace your hard disk drive by calling your support desk or Dell Computer Corporation.
STRIKE F1 to continue, F2 to run the setup utility"

So I press F1 and Windows boots fine and everything is normal. From within Windows I ran HDDLife and it reports that the system drive needs urgennt replacement, and the Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostics shows a SMART Status Fail on the system drive, showing that the Re-Allocated sector count (ID#5) is the only SMART attribute showing trouble (Value 140, Threshold 140, Worst 140, Warranty 1).

My question is: could it be that the hard drive is 100% healthy and that this message is caused by some other problem in the PC? Or should I trust this message 100%? In the latter case, what are the implications? Does it mean that very soon the hard drive will crash?

In anycase I was frightened enough to completely back up all my data to a 2nd drive.

to the best of my knowledge, these things don't lie. if it says something is wrong, something is wrong. what exactly is wrong, who knows for certain. but you did do the right thing and back everything up. If you still have warranty, seek it now. if not, it's probably a good time to invest in a new drive.

Well, it must be close to the end of its lifetime then. The curious thing is that the drive sounds perfectly fine, it seems that S.M.A.R.T. is an effective early warning system.I will continue using it until judgment day, in the meantime backing up important data on a daily basis.

I'd get a new drive soon. That error tells me you probably had a head crash and it's only a short time till the drive dies all together. Backup your data asap!

A head crash? The drive never clicked, nor does it click. I think that error code has to do with the reserve sectors of the drive being full.

Just get a new drive,  Usually mean theres been major failure. as it says the drive is not operating the way it should.

Not all drives become super noisey before they die, not all drives make clicking noise before they die.

Infact i've had few hard drives that just became dead. no warning. no noise no anything.

Coming from work as network support engineer and having supported over 30-40+ dell machines, Simple phone call to dell support and out pops engineer with new replacement drive.

quote:

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S.M.A.R.T. technology

S.M.A.R.T. stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. S.M.A.R.T. technology was developed by a number of major hard disk drive manufacturers in a concerted effort to increase the reliability of drives. It is a technology that enables the PC to predict the future failure of hard disk drives. S.M.A.R.T. technology has become an industry standard for hard drive manufacturers.

Through the S.M.A.R.T. system, modern hard disk drives incorporate a suite of advanced diagnostics that monitor the internal operations of a drive and provide an early warning for many types of potential problems. When a potential problem is detected, the drive can be repaired or replaced before any data is lost or damaged.

The S.M.A.R.T. system monitors the drive for anything that might seem out of the ordinary, documents it, and analyzes the data. If it sees something that indicates a problem, it is capable of notifying the user (or system administrator). S.M.A.R.T. monitors disk performance, faulty sectors, recalibration, CRC errors, drive spin-up time, drive heads, distance between the heads and the disk platters, drive temperature, and characteristics of the media, motor and servomechanisms. The errors the system can detect can be predicted by a number of methods. Currently the SMART system can detect about 70% of all hard drive errors.

Here's an example: motor and/or bearing failure can be predicted by an increase in the drive spin-up time and the number of retries it takes to get the drive spinning at full speed. Or, if the drive notes that error correction is being needed excessively, it can attribute this to a broken drive head or surface contamination, and it will create an alert before the problem gets worse. Armed with a prediction of failure, the user or system administrator can make a backup copy of key data, replace a suspect device prior to data loss, and avoid undesired downtime.

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This is just an update, I'm still using the same SMART fail hard drive on a 24/7 basis since I created this thread and it has been performing flawlessly. Of course I'm also backing up regularly just in case.