Hard drive calibration error

This involves a laptop hard drive but belive the answers will be the same. I just recieved a refurbished dell 5146 yesterday. It would not load windows, 2 of the 3 logo balls from win 7 would come on the screen and instant blue screen, tried repair and no dice. I ran dell's diagnostics and it came up clean so I called support, we reloaded the image, same problem...then tried reinstalling windows.....copying the setup files took forever...20 minutes in the tech scheduled me an onsite HD replacement.....so that taken care of...I let the install go, about 3 hours later I'm and running and sysytem appears to work just fine....turion2 x2, 4GB DDR2, ati 4330...much more adept at gaming than I would have thought as well....back to the point, I ran HD tune and the only warning I get was "14 calibration errors"....what exactly is that, is that cause of the slow install or is something else possibly wrong as well? How bad is the problem, as sans intial starup and reinstall...the machine is far exceeding my expectations...is there anything else I should be wary of or to bring up when the tech shows up to replaced the HD?
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Download HDTune and look at the "Health" tab. It'll tell you what's being reported by the drive's SMART status. I'm thinking you have bad sectors, and you've reached your re-allocation limit, so it can't mark anymore sectors to skip.

 

The thread is based off of my HDTUNE results. As the first post reads,a full scan came up clean, the only issue was "(0B) Calibration Retry Count "current 100" "Worst 100"Threshold 0"Data 14"Status Warning"

 

Calibration Retry Count is listed as the number of times that the computer's had to request a recalibration, and is supposed to indicate some sort of mechanical issue with the drive ( Can we believe S.M.A.R.T. ? and S.M.A.R.T. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). So basically, it sounds like the drive may be having some mechanical issues with keeping the storage disks running properly.

 

I usually associate calibration errors with clickiness. I'm not sure that attribute has anything to do with head movement, but anytime I see calibration errors, I also hear excessive clicking.

 

Replace the drive. It is not to be trusted.