hard drive making sounds

Yes. Any abnormal sounds that have not been heard before up til now should make you worry. If you have an imaging program, such as ghost or pqdi, you can get a new drive, slave it off, then copy the old drive to the new drive.

If you do not, you can get a new drive 80gb IDE drive costs only 70 dollars online by the way, reinstall Operating System, programs, etc,... Slave the old drive and copy your old documents and files over.

A really bad sound for drives, I hope i do this right lol is where it sounds like it's accessing the platters then you hear "Click, PING"...

Good luck

The easy way to check where the noise is coming from is to take the cover off of the case.

Then, you should be able to track down where the noise is coming from.

It is 'normal' for Windows to access the hard drive while opening the files on a CD.

First, Windows keeps track of your recent files.

Windows may also make changes to virtual memory when accessing the CD.

If the disk in the CD drive is a CD-RW disk, Windows has to access the hard drive and open the CD-RW reader software.

So, if the drive is making "normal" sounds, you likely have nothing to worry about.

It is still a good idea to make a back up of at least your data files.

If you believe that this activity recently started, you might want to check your system for spy-ware.

Give AdAware www.lavasoft.de a try.

Chas

Hard drives generally fail for two basic reasons: Defective heads; or defective hard drive motor.
If you have defective heads, a clicking noise is associated with the constant positioning of the heads. The drive logic initializes the read/write heads after the motor has reached the correct number of rotations. If they do not give the expected "READY" signal, the logic repeats this process again and again until it receives a time-out (2 - 5 seconds). If your hard drive starts making a scraping, metallic noise, this could lead to a "Headcrash". The read/write heads are sliding over the damaged surface of the hard drive.
A defective motor shows as a loud squeaking noise or a raw scraping sound. Or maybe nothing at all because the hard drive won't turn on. It might also exhibit as uneven spinning of the motor if a coil in the motor has failed. This might result in soft whistling or strong squeaking.