First thing I'd do would be to run chkdsk and let it check for and attempt to repair any bad sectors. Note that this will require a reboot and can run for several hours. After that I'd download disk diagnostics from Seagate or Western Digital and run them. That will give you an indication of the state of your hard drive. Keep those backups current and be ready to replace that hard drive if need be. Note that you can buy a 1 TB hard drive for around $60 these days, so they're not that expensive. Be sure you have either a complete system image backup or all the discs and drivers you need to restore a new hard drive.
`
Good luck.
After contacting a Dell technician, I explained to him my screen kept blacking out sporadically, sometimes leaving only a fragment of the screen visible. I had to manually shut it down, in order to reboot. He ran a test of the hard drive and the error code of 0146 came up. He told the my main hard drive was shot and provided me with a data recovery service. I explained to him that I was still able to reboot and access all my data, which btw was backed up on a second hard drive that I installed several years back. He then told me he would find the problem causing the error message 0146 and then removed a bunch of windows updates that he deemed unnecessary. He never did find what was causing the error code, but said there was still an issue with the hard drive, since the error code still comes up, and it could crash within hours or even months; there's no way of knowing.
My question is if my computer is operating "normally" is it possible to discover what exactly is causing the error and regardless, should I purchase and install a new hard drive? Thank you in advance!
-Dell XPS 9000
-Windows 7
-Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz 2.67 GHz
-6 GB RAM
-64-bit Operating System

Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic