I recently bought an HP Notebook Pavilion about a month ago. After good solid use, three days ago it gave me this message.

-------------------
SMART Failure Predicted on Hard Disk 4: SAMSUNG HM250JI-(S1)

WARNING: Immediately back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent.

Press F1 to Continue.
-------------------

Now, when I press F1 it does nothing. I have contacted HP and they are sending a new one, but I have to send this one to them. Problem is, I have certain personal data and other things on this HDD that need to be deleted. CC Numbers, ETC. that I don't want HP to have access to. I cannot get past this error even when I insert a bootable CD to reformat, it goes straight to this screen after POST. How can I get around this and boot to a CD, to format the HDD?

Hi, pull the old drive out and put in a 2.5" usb enclosure, plug it in another computer and read out your files.

Regards/ Bosse

_________________
Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

Cool thanks. Can you link me to a site that I can purchase one of those from?

2.5" usb enclosure needs to support up to or past 250GB

This is a SATA hard drive, no need to seek for enclosures, just plug it into a desktop PC as any desktop SATA hard drive...

_________________
Dmitry