HDD = poop?

My hard drive is making weird noises

A recording of the noise is attached (you may need to turn your volume up). In real life the sound isn't too loud, but definitely loud enough to cause concern. Plus there's the whole PC locking up thing that accompanies it.

There are a few interesting things to note:

1. The sound occurs in intervals of five, without fail
2. When the sound is occurring I cannot open new programs or even the task manager, but programs that are already open retain (near) complete functionality
3. I near “near “complete because this sound usually occurs when trying to access my list of drives via one of those drop-down sideways file tree doowabs. Like this:



Weird. Anyway, when I do this, the program I’m using when I try to access the drive will completely freeze. Other programs will work fine, unless I try to directly access the drive via one of those doowabs. Basically, open programs retain their full functionality save for accessing “my computer” (or any drives) directly from a menu.
4. If I’m reading data (music, video, etc) it will work fine. I can usually write to the disc during this time, though sometimes it writes very slowly.
5. If I’m playing a game (I’ve tried this with Bioshock and HL2), the game (even the loading screens) will run perfectly, but as soon as I alt+tab my way back to the desktop everything’s locked up again.
6. If I need to save something to a location, I cannot navigate to that location from explorer or any menu. I can, however, type in the exact location (ie. C:\Users\Desktop\whatever) and the file will save in a normal manner.
7. It doesn’t always happen when accessing those directory listings, sometimes it just starts
8. Usually all the programs I tried to start during one of these episodes will all simultaneously open when the sound stops (and it seems to just stop whenever it feels like it…), but not always. Sometimes a program will open but the sound will continue.
9. I have only encountered this when using Vista, never in Ubuntu.

Basically my computer has strange and inconsistent symptoms. Halp.

I should really test each of my two hard drives in my PC individually to see if the problem only occurs in one drive, but I’ve never really done that before. I’ve had enough disk mounting problems in linux to be scared away from the idea of booting with a missing drive.

Anyway, yeah, what's going on (and I'm not looking for any "lol vista sux" posts because, well, duh.) If anyone has any idea of a moar specific cause or a possible fix, please let me know.

Thanks.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Yeah, basically it all points to your HDD coming to a shuddering, noisy death.

Get a new HDD installed as your primary drive, then pray you can back up everything from your dying drive. Simple as that.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Stop using the drive immediately.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Yep, one of your drives is almost dead.

If it's your system drive where you installed your OS, I suggest you attempt cloning it with Acronis TrueImage to a new drive (of equal or larger size). That way you can replace the drive without having to reinstall the OS and programs and all.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Yeah, I guess I really need to check each drive individually and determine which drive is causing me this grief. If it's my FAT32 drive I'm going to have some trouble trying to back that sucker up (I've got around 300 gigs of stuff on there...)

It's just bizarre that this almost exclusively happens when trying to use one of those file directory trees...

How ya doing, buddy?

I am assuming you mean you have two physical drives, not logical ones. If you divided your HDD up into logical drives, then no matter which drive your data is on, there are still problems because the HDD is physically damaged.

Use it sparingly (as stated above), and get another HDD (they are cheap these days. YOu can grab like a 500 Gig HDD for a few hundred bucks) to back it all up.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?