Hi, something very strange has happened to my hard drive. I first noticed the problem when Norton AV was doing its weekly scan - about halfway through it just froze up, and I could hear a loud sound coming from the computer (almost surely from the hard drive) - it sounded like 4 loud clicks followed by a longer scraping noise, repeated.

The computer was frozen so I reset and let scandisk come on in windows. Strangely, the computer seemed to know something was wrong because rather than the normal 'fast' scandisk, it started doing the full sector by sector check.

Anyways, as soon as it reached cluster 2125 the computer froze and the same noises started coming from the drive. This happens every time I let the scandisk run that far.

Also strange is that the computer wants to run scandisk every time the computer is turned on now, even after a normal shutdown. But otherwise everything else runs normal and I can't even tell there is a problem.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas how to diagnose this problem considering the main tool to do so (scandisk) causes the problem itself.

My comp is an Athalon 1.2GHz with a 30GB IBM ATA-100 HD.