Your hard drive might be dying if...

Out of the blue this week, started getting kernel panics: spinning beachball in every open program, dock would freeze, mouse could move but do nothing, restart would only give me grey screen. This was initially after waking from sleep or the screensaver; I have done nothing to the comp recently besides installing an ATI 9800 card a couple months back, been running fine.
Today it's really taken a bad turn. After startup there is a horrible hiccuping noise from my boot drive, kind of like a windshield wiper you know? I can hear something physically clacking back and forth in there, I think it's the little arm that reads the platter. When I do get it to start up I can keep it running for a few minutes before it locks up again. I'm desperately trying to back up my projects and I hope I'm not damaging my drive every time it makes that noise on startup. The Hardware Test CD (v1.2.5, old) finds no problems, but this wouldnt be the first time that SMART diagnostics have given no warning of impending death. It does sound like a bad drive, no?

Good move with the spare drive and OS, John!
If you're unsure about the old one being defective, after you get your new one you might zero the old one using the option to overwrite zeros to it, which will map out any bad sectors which might be present, then use it for archiving or as a spare/emergency boot drive if it then seems to be operating normally again. As you might suspect, I'm not one to immediately jump to the conclusion that a drive is going to die when it clicks, whirs, and won't mount or boot. Screeching or sounds similar or worse than what you heard on the linked Hitachi site are a sure sign, but sometimes strange whirring and clicking happen when the directory is fouled up and the drive goes goofy running in a "do loop" as it repeatedly searches for something it can't find. I say this from my own experiences with drives, one of which is the startup drive I'm on right now and have been running 24-7 for 9 months now after having a problem similar to yours (although I don't know what your drive sounded like).
Glad you got your data - I'm sure it's a relief!
Gary

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