windows XP home OS...
I ran one of those drive scrubbing routines (Zdelete trial version) that overwrites all unused space on the drive, and here's what happened...
After about 1 hour, the routine stopped and the computer tried to re-boot, which it could not do (there was a DOS messsage saying the hard drive was not recognized). Tried re-booting again and
this time it stoped at a DOS screen that says "Imminent hard drive failure detected, back up data now and change hard drive". It also says "Hard drive attribute #5 failed" and gave me the option to continue the boot by pressing F1, which I did, and the system seemed to boot fine. I still get the "attribute #5 fail" DOS screen on all subsequent boot-ups, and pressing F1 results in a (seemingly) good boot-up.

I did find that the drive scrubbing routine left some HUGE temp files on the disk (sixteen 2GB tmp files, which I deleted manually), so obviously it didn't complete sucessfully.

I have run scandisk with the option checked to fix file system errors, which didn't seem to help. I have NOT run it with the option checked to scan the disk surface and attempt recovery of bad sectors (I did that a month ago (before this problem) and ended up having to reload the whole OS, so I'm gun-shy about doing that again). Also I have not de-fraged since this happened.

Any idea what "hard drive attribute #5" is, and why I'm getting this frightening message at boot-up?
Thanks in advance for any help or ideas.
...hal