The hard drive in my Dell is just 4 months past warranty, so of course it’s acting up.
About 1 month ago is started making a loud clicking noise and briefly stopping; the computer stops when this happens, although the cursor can still be moved and it doesn’t lose any data or anything. This happened maybe once a day. Now it happens a LOT; a loud CLICK-click, at no particular interval. Sometimes it does it eight times in a row, sometimes just once. Sometimes it goes for 20 minutes without doing it or more. Sometimes it happens a lot.
It’s also known as the Had Drive Death Clunk.
Your HDD is definately going to fail very soon.
IIRC, it’s the read/write head that is clunking and will sooner or later start ‘srcatching’ your drive surface introducing more and more bad sectors, resulting in failure when it ‘scratches’ a sector in the boot area or any of the OS area.
Diagnostic programs can be downloaded for free from most of the major drive manufacturers’ websites. If one isn’t available you can use the 30-day trial version of Ontrack Data Advisor.
However, these utilities will at most be able to diagnose hardware problems, not repair them. Since your drive is out of warranty you should buy a new drive and image the old one to it with the manufacturer’s software. Get a good screwdriver and take the old drive apart. It’s got some powerful magnets and shiny platters which can be used for craft projects.
Good thing new drives are cheap. I’m not going to bother backing it up, though… it’s just programs, I don’t keep any important data on it. Life sucks, n’est-ce pas?