Hard disk making noise on particular location and unable to format it.

Hello friends,

I have Hitachi SATA 60 GB hard drive and recently started making severe Noise from it.

So, I have partitioned hard drive now like below and traced where exact position sound coming from.


24 MB <- for Boot sector
15 GB <- Making noise and formatting stops by 14%
14 GB <- Good
14 GB <- Good
14 GB <- Good, Windows XP SP2 installed

I know the entire partition isn’t bad, but I don’t know how to diagnose it.

I tried with windows inbuilt software - chkdsk /f /v /r. Checkdisk didn’t repaired that, instead made the crunching sound for hours and reported 4MB Bad. Still making noise from the partition when I save something and read it, even windows gets hang when I access that partition. Rest of the partition is perfectly fine.

Is it okay, if I let that partition dead or can I recover the good clusters from it?

Kindly suggest a good software that can mark the defected sectors BAD or let user do mark the defected portion MANUALLY BAD AND UNREADABLE. There is no data in it and I can try with whatever the experiments you are going to advice me. ;-)

PS: - I could have download the Hitachi diagnostic ISO file but I don’t want to write a CD. I know you guys are clever enough to deal with this issueand support me.


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Hard Disk: Hitachi 60GB SATA (SMART)
Operating system: MS XP SP2
System manufacturer: Lenovo
System model: 0786A39
Bios: Ver 1.00PARTTBL
Processor: Genuine Intel(R) CPU T1400 @ 1.83GHz
Memory: 1014MB RAM

1) Is this the noise your HD is making:
Normally you will not hear the HD.
Hard Drive Click of Death Explanation and Live Demonstration - YouTube

PS: - I could have download the Hitachi diagnostic ISO file but I don’t want to write a CD.

2) Run the diagnostic tool.

If your hard drive has mechanical problems and is failing, the failure will likely affect all partitions.

I wouldn't expect to be able to diagnose by ear which partitions may have bad sectors and I wouldn't expect bad sectors to be the source of any particular noise.

If the hard drive does not pass diagnostic tests, I would get any valuable data off of it, regardless of partition.