I have a Compaq Presario laptop.

For a while I have been getting an occasional scratchy sound, for some reason especially when I save a downloaded file. Maybe it's the location of the folder.

A little while ago, I tried to open a particular folder and got a buzzing sound. The folder didn't open and the sound kept on until I turned the macine off.

Maybe it's obvious. Am I about to lose my hard drive? Is there a "repair" option or will it be "replace"? Any idea of likely cost?

Thanks very much

Sounds like your HD is about to give up the ghost. Make sure you back up everything important right now. After that, you can use some of the disc utilities in Windows to scan the drive; make sure you do a surface scan, it can tell you if the actual sectors are going bad. You can find free- & shareware on the 'net (look at PC World, PC Magazine, TUCOWS, etc.) that can check your drive, or you can buy a disc suite like Norton that can analyze your drive.

If your sectors are going bad, I've seen (back in college) a drive that locked out those sectors so you can still use the disc. But w/ HD's being (relatively) cheap, you might as well look at getting a new one.

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

I know what you mean about bad sectors. I think scandisk is supposed to do that stuff - I think it replaced the old one whose name I can't even remember.

But that would cause data errors and not noises, I think. I have to call the company anyway so I'll discuss it with them.

I'm hoping somebody can take an image of my disk and then put that on the replacement. I will back up my files, sure, but all the program installs....

On the other hand, I'll get rid of a lot of junk.

:-) I didn't mean to imply that bad sectors would cause the noise. Just that they would help tell you how bad your drive is getting and how fast.

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Common Sense v2.0-Striving to make the world a little bit smarter.

In case anyone is wondering, it was my cooling fan making the noise. I had it replaced.

lol, I've had that, after tinkering around inside my PC, there was a cable resting against the CPU fan, and it made a helluva grinding noise as I powered the PC up. I got the fright of my life, and turned off quickly. After this happened a few times, I realised it was still booting as normal, and opened up the PC case again, only to move the cable, and the pc returning to its soft, dulcet whisper quiet noise...

However, there is no sound that will strike fear into the hearts of man, than the sound of a clicking HDD