usually you can disable the notices, I'll take a look at how to do it; but you should definitely back up anything important because once a drive starts going bad its only a matter of time before it goes poof.

EDIT: Egnever is right, you probably shouldn't turn off the notice, but I know how annoying they can be.

download this and run it and it will tell you the health status of your drive(s)
http://crystalmark.info/redirect.php?product=CrystalDiskInfoInstaller

I had this happen to me on one of my Linux machines. The drives keep a certain amount of "extra" space in case certain parts of the disk become unreadable. In many cases, it can reconstruct the data, but it will move the data to another section, then mark the old one as bad.

If you get near the end of the "spare" space, then you might get a warning like this.

If your drive is relatively new, you might want to pursue a warranty replacement. If it's relatively old, it might be better just to replace it. In any event, it's probably worth someone taking a serious look at it.

There are apparently some ways of forcing the drive to reset the spare sectors value, but I didn't feel it was worth the risk. I just bought a new drive.

you think I should just get a new one?

Your not using RAID or anything like that are you? Fortunately, replacing a regular old 7200k RPM spindle drive is a pretty cheap venture. Correct me if I am wrong but I think they can be had for ~$40

Sorry, I couldn't resist the plug!

Just installed an M2 SSD in my laptop, and the speed is insane

I'm a Luddite tho and still like mechanical drives for my bulk storage needs.

AVG's PC Tune-Up tool is the one I'm most familiar with, but there are other good ones. I would try running one of those and see if it correts the problem.

Or, if you know the manufacturer of your hard drive, you can check their website for a disk repair program.

I would not advise just turning it off and ignoring it.

If you don't care if you lose everything stored on that drive then by all means turn off the message but that is an early warning that that drive is beginning to fail. Not something you should ignore if you value your data at all.

To turn it off you would need to go into the Bios and turn off Hard drive monitoring. You would do that by repeatedly pressing the f2 key when you first turn on the computer until it says entering setup. You would need to dig around in there till you find the setting probably something like smart drive monitoring and turn it off.

I would highly recommend making sure you have all the data on that drive backed up though as that warning is not for nothing.

Something you might try is opening windows explorer and finding your hard drive in the listings on the left. Right click the drive and chose properties and then find the tools tab. On the tools tab find error checking and hit check.

It will schedule a disk check for the next time you reboot and try to repair any errors it finds.

thank you so very much

Check out the Dell page here:

http://www.dell.com/support/article/uk/en/ukbsdt1/sln146180/understanding-and-troubleshooting-your-hard-drive?lang=en

I'd go through the whole page (I'd set some time aside for the whole process), but in particular, look at Item 3:

You've had some good advice above. Above all, you don't want to ignore or disable that alert, but take some action on it.

What that will be depends on how serious a problem you have, but if nothing else, I'd take this as a massive hint to backup any data that's important to you.