The rattle might come from the inability of the head to seek to track zero and it just keeps trying. I engineered hard drives but it was in 1980's. At any rate if it rattles and it does not work just replace it. There is not much chance to get the data out however. An IT guy told me recently that if a drive is just starting to go, showing signs of not working but still working until it warms up, he would put it in the refrigerator for a few hours then plug it in to the compuiter and get the files he wanted from it as fast as he could.
I might consider saving the computer and going that route. As long as I can figure out how to install the hard drive. I never replaced one before. I hear the Seagate's are the best, so I'll look to buy one of these.
Its simple. Just unplug it and slide it out. Slide the new one in and plug it in. Load the OS and you're good to go. You'll need to re-load some drivers so have your resource disk handy. If its XP you may not need that even.
Make sure EVERYTHING is unplugged if you do this. I've been subject to blowing up stuff in my computer by sticking screwdrivers in places they should have gone when I was around age 13. Very nice shocking effect and nice popping sounds and weird smells are perfect signs of this. Funny when I look back on it, but some of the things I screwed up could have been considered expensive back then
I'm going to give it a try, not much to lose. I ordered a Seagate 80 Gig for only $50. Dell site shows these having a life cycle of 600,000 hours, that's 68 years. A bit longer than my HP HD lasted.
I would go the newegg route. You can get top parts for the same price as a dell using cheap parts. I would also buy a video on computer building. It is very very simple. My latest computer is the first one I have built. I realized how simple it was after a friend installed a video card in. Took about 2 mins including removing and putting the case back on. Then I realize how stupid I was for paying the computer store 50 dollars to do it themselves. They are worse then a auto mechanics. All you do is just plug things in and call tech support if you have a question. I had to call 3 times when building mine but was mainly to confirm what I am doing. Computer booted up fine the first time
Basically you can have two failure mechanisms. In your case, the failure may heve been in the electronics part of the drive. Mostly, failures are due to mechanical causes, heads, arm, disk stack and these often announce themselves by noises. BTW, what would be the concensus about those fabulous MTBF's advertised by the disk manufacturers: 100,000+ hrs or more. I never seem to be able to come near these figures. Any comments?
My HP hard drive gave out at about 23,000 hours. I currently have about 4000 hours on my Dell laptop, no problems yet.
My opinion is that the run theres 24 hours a day and they determine that it ran for 100k hours. Which is over 4000 days or 10 years. Consumer turn theres on and off x amount of days which from what I hear is more damaging the the HD then letting it run, sorta like starting your car does the most damage to it. I might be wrong though.
This website says you are better off shutting down when not using to extend the life of the hard drive. My HP was fine all day until after being on for 12 hours and then the hard drive blew. I noticed some dust inside that might have caused over heating although I had no sign of it at all because it's hard to tell on a desktop. Staying on steady would probably make any little problem like dust worse. When I bought the Seagate HD it is rated at 50,000 cycles on/off or 136 years if you shut it once a day. http://www.preservation.gc.ca/info/faq_2_e.asp#2