beeping laptop hard drive?

[Dark54555]

Alright...so last evening, i noteced my Portege 3500 beeping. I figured it was a sound error, as it was a faint, almost inaudible beep. A few minutes later, it bluescreens...a real rarity in XP. So, after running into some more problems, I wiped, re-formatted, and re-installed (which seems to be the routine with this piece of crap lately). Well, today the thing was giving me about 5 seconds of mouse movement to about 2 minutes of stall. So, I pulled out the HD to defrag it using an external enclosure. As I'm sitting here and it's defragging, i notice the beeping again.

The hard drive is beeping.

Yeah, I've never heard anything like it. And now, it's stalled out on 47% of the defrag, making a distinctive "Click-Click-Click-Click pause Click-Click-Click" pattern.

The drive is a toshiba MK6022GAX. Any ideas?

 

[Connoisseur]

Dunno about the beeping but the clicking sound is def a strong indicator that the HD is dying. Chances are the write head is misaligned and it's hitting the platters. All the symptoms you're describing are standard to HD failures.

 

[Dark54555]

it's the beeping that really weirds me out...cause i didn't think hard drives could beep.

 

[jschuk]

I have heard a few of them beep. What will really amaze you is when the make what I would call a "bomb drop" noise, a high pitch tone that transitions to a low pitch tone. I have only seen/heard about 6-9 of those drives in 4 years of work, but it never ceases to make everyone in our 40'x50' room to turn their heads.
That HDD will need to be replaced.