curious hard drive issue

We got a brand new dell precision laptop but due to various reasons didn't get to opening the box until after a month from delivery.

The first thing it did was during the dell screen make some kinda loud, not-normal noises:
CLICK...CLICK....CLICK....CLICK...
for about 15-20 seconds
then it showed a message saying something like
Internal HDD Soft error, fixed by retries, press f1 to continue.
Then it went about its business. It never clicked while in windows, and windows never acted weird.
Two days later on bootup it did the same thing, so dell is sending a new hard drive.
The tech on the phone had no idea what that error message meant, and the best idea he had about the noise was that sometimes the arm in the drive gets stuck.

Since the dvdrw was also DOA, i was hoping to trade the whole system in, but it has been over 30 days so nope =\

Hopefully the noises and messages were only caused by that particular drive, and the symptoms will go away with the new drive.

I'm still curious what the heck a hdd soft error is and how it can be fixed by "retries"?