Eek! Scary noise

[rdhatt]

http://rdhatt.sdf1.org/scarynoise.mp3

I recorded this with my notebook, so forgive the white noise. The noise
has occured serveral times now, a week or more apart. A cold restart makes
the problem go away.

The obvious culprit is the hard drive, but I'm stumped why a restart would
make the problem go away. I would have figured this would happen once and
the HD would give up the ghost permanently - not fix itself. Still I'm
worried. Any ideas?

 

[Gatt]

Failing head, it's getting stuck trying to read a certain part of the drive, restart makes it return to a good section. Probably somewhere that virtual memory is being written to randomly, so it'd occur randomly. It'll eventually spread. Back up the data, and replace as soon as you are able.