In alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt "ed jurewicz" ejurewicz@comcastnet
wrote:

Just had a seagate drive go south on me and the symptom wasn't quite a bird
chirping but an intermittant high pitched noise that got progressively worse
over ashort period of time time. I actually thought it was one of the fans
and spent a bit of time inside the computer removing and replacing them.
Finally traced it to the hard drive which was less than 6 months old when I
started having troubles on boot up. This was a 250 g drive.

Probably bearings going bad.
Sometimes you can get them to run temporarily, long enough to extract a
frisbee, by rocking them. That's rotating them (flat-wise, like you
would a frisbee) and then *yanking* them back in the opposite direction.
Also works for drives with stiction problems.

If however, you have either, then you really need to save your files
before the drive really does crap out completely.

Once you start hearing funny noises from a drive, it's time to backup in
a hurry!

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