HD error: My "volume is dirty"

Ok, so i'm turning on the laptop (dell e1405, 60gb seagate momentus 5400.2). I was kinda fiddling behind the laptop raising the back end up on a book to give some vent space, when i slightly drop it. It drops about an inch or less, thudding onto the somewhat soft book. Seems like nothing to me.

So I come back around to the front of the laptop and I see a Windows blue screen saying that my hard disk has a problem, "the volume is dirty."

It then runs through chkdisk, finds a couple bad sectors, and deletes a file named "A0004134.PNF" in sector "$I30".

I looked up the PNF file extension (nothing came up on the search of the actual file itself) and supposedly it's a "portable network bitmap graphic" type of file.

So far there doesnt seem to be any performance hiccups, and when I run NHC's S.M.A.R.T. analysis, it reports nothing wrong, a status of "OK".

Basically I'm wondering if anything critical has happened to my computer/hard drive, if this PNF file is important, and if me dropping this laptop an inch while it was loading windows did anything to cause this. I haven't installed anything on this 1.5 month old system in weeks, besides NHC, and AVG found no virus after a scan.

I'm confused, but should I be worried?

EDIT: I also installed Microsoft .NET 2.0 (req'd for NHC)

 

I'm pretty sure you're ok, I'm guessing that when you dropped it the read/write head might have just tapped on the actual platter and might have corrupted that file.

S.M.A.R.T. is just that, smart. I find the diags to usually be very accurate.

 

Hmm, so i'm lucky that the head didn't touch another more critical file I suppose (unless this PNF file is more significant than I/we think).

Does this occurence make it more likely for the head to mess up again?

 

hard to say. Was the computer turned on when you dropped it?

If you get actual bad sectors, that's always a *really* good sign something is wrong. Run chkdsk every day or something for the next while, and see if any more errors pop up. If they do, it's time to get a new HD. If your HD manufacturer has another tool available to check the disk for errors, run that too.

Usually, it's *really* bad news if the head touches the actual platter, and will more likely than not mean a ruined HD.

However, you might have been lucky that only a few sectors were ruined, and nothing else happened. S.M.A.R.T. might be smart, but it's not perfect, and it'd be foolish to rely entirely on it.