Old Dell laptop predicting drive failure

[Wholly Schmidt]

I was given an old Inspiron 5100 from someone who was just going to throw it out. He said "the hard drive's bad", but he's not a computer guy in the least.

A fresh format and XP install has it functioning just fine for me so far, but every time I boot it I get an warning just after the BIOS screen.

"SMART Failure predicted on Hard Disk 2
Warning: Dell's disk monitoring system has detected that the drive on the EIDE controller is operating outside of normal specifications. It is advisable to immediately back up your data and replace your hard disk drive by calling Dell"...blah blah blah

Possible false alarm? Accident waiting to happen? Anything I can do to fix it, short of dropping in a new hard drive that the machine's not worth investing in?

Even if it's gonna die, I'll run it into the ground as an extra email/browser machine around the apartment and at least get some use out of its final days, but if I was a little more confident in its stability I might try to get a bit more out of it, like set up my iTunes library on there or something. I just don't feel like copying all that music if it's going to crap out the next time I boot or something, so anyone with experience on Dell's failure predictions, let me know.

[Stroker Ace]

Put your media on a network share (from your desktop PC) and have the best of both worlds.

[RichVR]

This might be helpful:

http://dansdata.blogsome.com/2007/12...y-of-the-week/

[Wholly Schmidt]

Gracias!