There's something wrong with some 60-gigabyte Hitachi hard drives that shipped with IBM ThinkPads recently. IBM has posted an upgrade that fixes this problem and, to make sure the importance of this update is not lost on any users, IBM is describing the upgrade as mandatory.
IBM has really bad hard drives in their laptops. I had one at work that left only once the building. Even then it had to be replaced within 1 year. Doesn't mean that they weren't bad in general if I would seen many HD failures with colleagues…