Hard drive problems

My brother in law called and said his dell came up on the screen saying that is 0 drive is working outside the parameters etc. and this was his disc monitoring system. He is supposed to call dell. How bad of news is this? If his hard drive is bad how can he get any info off of it?

we need more specific info;
when does the msg occur and what does it say?
It may be that the BIOS needs a tweek, but better input will lead to a better suggestion.

That is the only thing it says. He goes in and hits f1 and tries to get into windows but it cycles through and comes back to this page. I had him try to go to safe mode but it still cycles through to this page.