If your hard drive is making strange sounds but you still have access to your data then first of all copy all of your vital data to a second location (you can then investigate the strange sounds at your leisure).
The sounds here are from hard drive recovery tasks where all access to the user data had been lost. The purpose of this short article is to provide sound samples of hard drives which have suffered some of the more common forms of physical hard drive failure. The sounds that it makes when power is first applied may provide a great deal of information regarding what has gone wrong. When you have lost access to your data one of the first and most useful steps you can take towards determining the cause of the hard drive failure is to listen to your hard drive.
