Hard drive noise

[eap]

I have a Dell Inspiron notebook with a 20g HD
running XP Home. I have had no problems for about 1½
years. I turned it on and the screen froze
I hit f2 and it said it cannot detect the HD. Then the HD starts making a loud clicking sound!?
I hit ctl/alt/del and it finishes booting up. I scanned the disk, no errors.
I did a backup just in case.
I have not tried to contact dell I also think my warranty has expired.
Does it sound like I need a new HD?

Thanks

 

[etarhan]

You should make sure that your warranty has expired. This may be an expensive (around $80) assumption.

Your HDD looks like it has had it. You may try installing a new HDD and start over.

 

[Peahippo]

Hard disks die in interesting ways.

Basically, you will find two types of hardware failures (not counting media errors): driving components and logic devices. The clicking sound you heard was probably some sort of fault in the drive mechanism.

The fault may have been transient, acute or systemic. If it's systemic, then yes, your drive is dying since it will happen again, etc. If it's acute, you probably would have not been able to get the disk to run again. But it may have been transient ... it happened once, and may never happen again.

If you are under warranty, then get it replaced as such.

If you are out of warranty, then just use the machine. You already did the best thing to adapt ... you did a backup. Your data is saved, and there's no way to control a hardware failure.