Hi all,

I have a laptop that was running great till a few days ago. All i did was close a couple of applications, and one of them froze. I cntl+alt+del, and reboot, it said a program wasnt responding, so i shut it down. It then came back with a cannot find ntoskrnl.exe please reload a copy of the file. No the computer wont boot to windows anymore :(

So i went to fdisk, and deleted he DOS partition, and started over from scratch, and was going to install XP. Now when i boot i get a SMART HDD failure is iminent, please back up data. And XP wont install. Anyone know of any utilities that can check out my disc, and maybe fix this?

The laptop is a PII 366 Celeron 128mb Ram, and a 6 gig HD running a Phoeniz version 4 BIOS, i believe. THanks in advance!

Your best bet is to have a look on the harddisk manufacturers website.
I know Maxtor do a utill (Powermax) but it only works with Maxor & Quantum drives.

yeah i tried, this is an older drive that is discontinued, and there are no utilities available. its a Hitachi 23AA something model.

There is another thread similar to this one bouncing about.

One of the suggestions was to disable SMART monitoring in BIOS and fdisk/ reformat/ reinstall again.

At least this way SMART wont stop you from continuing.

yeah i could try that, but if the drive is going to fail soon, then its pointless to continue with the installation. I've searched the net for a utility of sorts with nothing available...

Think it's time to get a new drive.

well i just got a utility from hitachi to test it out, and maybe repair. so we'll see what heppens!