Laptop HDD sounds like a motorboat! Next steps?

[ryangarfield]

I regularly back up windows, but also decided to simply copy and paste the My Documents folder as this has the most irreplaceable stuff, as well as copy and paste my C drive onto external drives. The HDD is only 100 GB, and I have plenty of backup storage space, am I missing anything? Programs I'm pretty sure will not get saved right? Thats not a huge deal I guess.

[ryangarfield]

How long do you think I have till total failure?

[dylz]

When you have time you can check the drive for errors: http://onecare.live.com/site/en-us/article/chkdskhowto.htm , also defragment and try sone of these tools. Maybe someone else has can help?

[SLK001]

Is it your HDD or your fan? What does a SMART test tell you?

If it was me and I had verified that it was the HDD going bad, I would pull the drive and image (or at least "try to") everything over to a new drive, then put the new drive into my laptop. You could then either discard the drive after you smashed it with a hammer, or convert it to a USB secondary drive. If SMART had given me really bad news, I would just smash the drive - don't risk any more data loss with a bad drive.

[ryangarfield]

Hmm, upon closer inspection I think it might actually be the fan afterall. Now what do I do?