inspiron 600m hard drive making strange noises

Question

the Toshiba (dell factory installed) hard drive in my inspiron 600m has been making alot of noise lately. it first made these noises about a month ago, it had been on for like 3 days and i figured maybe it was heat. so i left it off over night and a good part of the day and it appeared to be fine. after that point i have tried to not leave it on for such extened amounts of time. however the noise cam back every now and then,untill finally last night it became exteme. when the noise occures the computer tends to pause, seemingly unable to load off the hard drive. the noise is loud enough that you cna hear it clearly from about 3m away and is usually a grinding type noise sometimes with clicks(like something droping?) the clicks are when the most severe pauses occure. i have run the full diganostic program on the dell cd and it passed all the tests, it took about 4 hours to complete the tests on a 30gig drive(it often whent very slow or even stoped checking blocks during times the noise was audiable). although it passed all the tests there is clearly something wrong, at times the computer becomes almost unuseable. also the system is still under warenty. thank you for your replies.

otachi · Answer

i am currently allowing norton AV to do a full system scan for viruses(just incase this is somehow a result of that) and the hard drive (or some part of the computer) let out either a squeal or some kind of fuctuating electronic tone like noise. sorry its hard to describe. norton has found one virus though, dont know if it could be related or not.

otachi · Answer

AV scan wasnt able to finnish, windows shut down because of a device failure(most likely the hard drive). so i let it cool and in small batches backed up my really important files(i could run it for about 10 mins then it wouldnt run well enough anymore(again heat issue?)) but now that i have copied or delete as much as i could and have about 20% free space it is operating somewhat better.

Storage, Drives & Media

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