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.

If the files are important enough, back them up now, then get a replacement hard drive quickly. You could use Acronis True Image, or Norton Ghost to make a exact duplicate of the hard drive.

There is no way to back it up , cannot get the HDD to boot beyond that point. I read here at Dani web earlier that you can toggle the SMART off and on but in her BIOS there is no way to do this. Any ideas?

Usually when the SMART section bad message appears there is usually a message that says something like "press F1 or F2 to continue", if it dosen't...then the hdd may be beyond help.

That is correct, I get the option F1 to go to setup F2 to continue. If I hit F1 it takes me to the BIOS setup , if I hit F2 it tries to boot and then gives the SMART command failure to boot press F1 to go to setup F2 to continue. I f I could disable the SMART feature then I think it would boot. It otherwise seems to see the HDD but cannot get beyond this stage. thanks for the patience

Unfortunately there isn't any way that I'm aware of to bypass the SMART section, and if the press F2 to continue dosen't work, it dosen't look good. Just for grins...try opening in safe mode.

When you start the POST, can you hear the hdd spin up? If you can, there is one last ditch effort you can try, you can take the hdd out and put it in the freezer overnight, this has been reported to have some temporary success. If you can't hear the hdd spin up, that usually is the kiss of death.

http://www.datarecoverypros.com/hard...ry-freeze.html

Let us know how you fare.

You could also try putting it in another working computer and see if you can see it in a slave mode. If you can and you can access the files, you could clone the hard drive to a good one. dcc is right too the freezer can work but have a replacement drive ready

If the hdd isn't accessable in the SAFE mode, try clearing the CMOS, if this dosen't work, the problem isn't you OS, putting it in another machine will not accomplish anything if it is a bad hdd.

True if it is to the point where you don't have spin up, but call it dumb luck I have had help me out by putting in another machine. I was able to get what I needed off the drive, before it hit the trash can.

The one thing that has not been addressed here is that if the computer is less than a year old, it's still under warranty. If you are going to remove the hdd, be careful that you leave things as much as possible as it was. Good luck.