Noise on Inspiron 4150 Hard drive

Question

My Inspiron 4150's HD start making really loud knocking sound and all sorts of noises last night when i shut it down.  This happened before ( about a month ago) and i heard from my friend that it might be software problem, so i erased my drive and reinstalled XP, everything came back to normal, and that was last month.  But now its down again, this morning i cant even boot up my system, the furthest i got is the logon screen and after i typed in my password, it shutdown by itself,  havent had any error message or blue screen though.  I ran the IBM disk diagnostic tool (since the HD is made by IBM), result said that its in good shape. And right now, the noise is constant during any normal HD operation.  I tried reinstall XP, but it's taking forever to format C drive, its still formatting now, 5% in 20 mins!! so any ideas? is the HD dying?  Oh, I did get a virus recently, and it was qarantined by Norton.  Thanx for you time!!

johnallg · Answer

The hdd is dying.

eshan2 · Answer

After i pop in the mandrake move CD and bootup w/ linux,i deleted the C: partition on the HD(i have 2 partitions, C and D), and partition C again and formated it. the noise is gone after that, everything came back to normal, reinstalled windows XP, everything's fine now!  Can anybody explain this?

Storage, Drives & Media

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