harddrive failure? please help

[kino1898]

Recently, when I boot up and the BIOS screen is there, the message appears something like "Primary Master Slave S.M.A.R.T. Harddrive status bad. Immediately back up data and replace hard drive disk. Press F1 to continue" . This message appeared two weeks ago after I moved my computer around a lot. When I turned it on after moving, the message appeared for the first time, I hit F1, and then I looked and saw all my documents in My Documents were gone. Week or 2 later, I installed Half-Life 2 and now all the files became corrupted, so I reinstalled HL2. Those files didnt work and within a day, when trying to boot up, it does not even get to Windows, it just restarts and has me hit F1 to continue. It won't even boot into safe mode. I thought the IDE cable or something else could be loose so I re-secured all those and the message still comes up.

So any suggestions and things to try? Could it be that the cable went bad? What about the motherboard itself? What would make a piece of hardware fail like this? How to fix?

Here are my specs:
Western Digital 80 GB HD
Intel 2.4 ghz pentium 4
512 mb pc2700 ddr-333 ram
Aopen AX45-8XN Mother board
Thanks very much for any help

 

[angel]

The drive has mechanical moving parts inside that can get old/be damaged as well as electronics that can fail. Once a drive starts to go, it will generally just get worse and worse (as you've experienced). There's no way to "fix" such a drive.
Did you back up your files when you first realized your drive was going?
It's time to get another drive.

 

[brite750]

dont understand, when something says your hdd is bad, you test it with the mfr diagnostic program to find out. Did you do this? why dont you think your hdd is bad and replace it?

 

[CarlssonMB]

Its time for another drive

 

[ranikolahdd]

No it is not time for another drive.
It has a little bad sectors in firmfare erea that can be fix.
Some of the modules thare has been damaged and he is making trouble.
Nikola