Hey I have an HTC SHIFT with a 40gb hdd in it, i use windows 7 and have never had a need for the hidden recovery partition with vista on it so i loaded gparted on to a memory stick and deleted all the partitions on the hdd to one big one, saved and exited to install windows 7 again and now everytime i start the computer it warns me of an SMART bad status and to press F1 if i want to continue.

I cannot turn off this message in the BIOS and when i resumed to install windows 7 it took 3 times as long as it normally does.

if i buy a new SSD disk that would fit in it would i still get the SMART error? is the BIOS HTC SHIFT modified to look for a HPA at a specific offset so a new drive wouldn't help? if so would it simply be a matter of allocating those 3gb's and it would stop complaining?

Or isn't there a problem at all with this HPA and I just did it wrong, would i need to take out the drive and format it in another computer to fix the False SMART message?

You cannot reset SMART alerts once triggered unless you work with drive firmware. Period.
Did you ask HTC customer service about suitable replacement for the disk and/or BIOS requirements?
If your drive is defective, replace it. Or have it serviced (btw what drive is ?) if possible. By a pro, not by yourself.

Hello, a while ago I last posted here.

The HTC SHIFT still works as it should, tho I can't defrag anymore without a quick BSOD and immediate reboot.

I still have to press FN+F1 at BIOS post check to be able to boot anything incl. Windows.

How is it that this started happening the moment i started tampering with the HPA in Gparted and has remained ever since and you still think it is hardware related?

If i removed the harddrive from the SHIFT and connected it to my main pc and did a low level format would it reset or fix this problem?

Its definately drive hardware related. If your data is important to you, backup immediately & replace the drive.

The SMART alerts are warning you there is something wrong with the drive... a low level format will not fix the problem.