I'm working on my mom's computer and she freaked because it told her "There was an imminent hard drive failure about to occurr." I did some digging and found it was related to the S.M.A.R.T. technology in the hard drive.
The message appears every time you boot, but it will still let you boot into Windows and every thing seems fine. How serious are these warning messages? Do we really need to immediately replace the hard drive?
Best Answer
Yes. Stop using it. Take the drive out and attempt to back up everything you want. A HDD should not be used once it's started to fail (Once it's failed, it'll start failing more and more and more)
The drive could die now, or it could die in a year's time. There's no real way of knowing, all a SMART result can tell you is how the drive is performing right now. IMO, it's not worth the risk - back it up and replace it.