I recently put together an old PC that a friend had passed along to me and things had been running smoothly until yesterday when I decided to create a disk image for backup. About 1/3 of the way through I'm told there's trouble reading a sector off the HD so I stop the process and proceed with a disk scan. Disk scan was stuck on some sectors with the HD making some clicking noises before I gave up for the night in troubleshooting. So what I'm wondering is, would a faulty IDE cable cause symptoms of a bad HD or is my HD really ready to bite the bullet?

Can you plug it into another machine and run diagnostics on it?

Clicking noises from the hard drive are pretty much a sure sign that it is on its last legs. I'd recommend that you backup all important data as quickly as you can, then start thinking about getting a replacement. The current drive may continue to function for a while longer, but I would not be optimistic, and I certainly wouldn't trust it or use it for anything important.

There's a chance that it may still be under warranty; if so you might be able to get a free replacement. Good luck with it

After trying that backup...

If you can't copy the files, you can,if necessary, use "dd", skipping eventual bad blocks, as explained here.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-drive-764487/

After you have secured the files, you might use Google to find the HDD makers utility program, HUTIL, SeaTools, etc., and run it to check the HDD. If there is no utility, try SMART. Check your BIOS and HDD to see if it is activated.

Unless any future content isn't of any importance, the HDD rule is, when in doubt, throw it out.

thanks guys for the replies! Looks like the drive itself is getting ready to fail so I'm gonna have to back up the data quick and junk it...

hehe I like that quote!