The drive electronics are failing the self-test - yes, replace the drive ASAP.

Do I need to buy a Dell E1405 hard drive or can I purchase any laptop hard drive?

Does it need to be a Dell hard drive or can I get any laptop hard drive?

Any 2.5" 9.5 mm SATA notebook  drive will work.

I also received that error, but the hard drive was failing because the bios settings had somehow changed so it wasn't reading the drive properly.  The bios setting had been changed from a SATA drive to an AHCI sata.  I changed the settings, deleted all partitions and started from scratch.  It's been running just fine ever since. 

You may have temporarily resuscitated the drive, but keep backups. 

Hi,

I have been unable to boot my laptop in window. Could you tell how can one check the BIOS setting and change it.

Thanks,

Saeer

F2 at powerup to get into the BIOS;  F12 gets you to the menu that brings up the Dell diagnostics.

I found this thread searching 2000-0146 error code, i went into my bios and saw i too was set to ahci vs ata, i have a new wd hd due to dell diagnostics telling me the original hd was bad (same error code), and yet the brand new drive gives same error code in dell diagnostics!

So decided to search a bit, found this thread, and saw the talk about the settings of ahci to ata in bios.

Went in and changed mine to ata - saved/exited and am going to now delete the partition, reinstall vista and drivers and see if this works, will also re run the diagnostic tests too to see if it still gives me that same code again.

Interestingly i took the new drive out and hooked it upto my main pc, installed the western digital lifeguard diagnostics and ran it for 6 hrs extended test, drive shows as pass and healthy, so makes me wonder why dell diag is showing it as error 2000-0146, maybe it is that bios settting - sure hope so will report back once i get the reinstall and re testing done...

Man i hope this fixes it...

Didnt fix it like i hoped, this is a new drive from dell (wd 500gb) but heck guess it could be a bad one just seems odd for a new drive to be bad what are the odds maybe less than 3% im guessing?  Maybe the motherboard has something funky going on heck i dunno but still getting that 2000-0146 error code every time i test the drive in dells diagnostics mode..