There are various other "more normal" reasons for the noise.
Bad power supply fan, bad CPU chip fan...  It could be a fluke...
Unless you determine where the noise is coming from, we
can only guess about the hard drives.
If the hard drive was/is making almighty grinding noises, it should show
many more bad sectors and will more than likely not last long.
The only time I saw that happen, the drive was "toast" in a short time.
Any rapid increase in the number of bad sectors is cause for replacing
the drive.          Rick Glazier
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nicki Gemmell" mailto:[log in to unmask]
I am having difficulties with my main machine, P166mmx, 64mb ram, 2x 2 GB HDDs.  Last weekend my machine told me that I had problems
on one of my drive partitions.  I did the scandisk thing and it threw up huge numbers of bad sectors.  After this I scandisked all
of the other partitions and had the same problem with the other partition on the same drive.  I decided to back up what I could
(lost all the data on the original problem partition) and then fdisked back to one partition and reformatted etc.
This morning the machine made almighty grinding noises on boot up.  I switched off, checked the fan etc and then rebooted it on its
side (its a tower).  It booted up fine and now seems to be running quietly again.
Can I have some expert advice?  Is that HDD about to go to disk heaven?

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