What brand of drive?  If a Western Digital go to www.westerndigital.com and download their diagnostics application.  Load it on a floppy (it's bootable) and follow the instructions.  It will check your drive and tell you if it is history.  I think Maxtor has a similar app on their web site.  It doesn't sound too good.

>Hi, a couple of days ago a clicking sound began coming from what seemed like the location of my hard drive. The screen froze and I had to reboot. It worked fine for a little while, and then it happened again. When I tried to reboot again, I got a black screen with a message " invalid disk " . Ran scan disk and got error messages every couple of seconds, with messages like, size of file being misrepresented or area is damaged. When I tried to reformat, I got the message " invalid media or track O bad, disk unusuable, format terminated." Guess I would like to know if my hard drive is dead?
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