help please, sudden lag during start up

[i23intheplace2b]

hi, first of all, thank you for reading this.

few nights ago, during normal usage, i heard a faint click/snapping noise followed by a consistent, high pitched whistling noise coming from my tower. I'm sure this isn't the common chirping noise from the power supply.

most running applications continued to run properly, but very slowly.

i've noticed accessing certain files on my hd took much longer than usual.

the noise wouldn't stop along with the spinning color wheel, and some actions were so slow it seemed nearly frozen.

i forced restart and logged in without a problem, however, once the dock and finder would load, my desktop icons would take about 2 or more minutes to show up.

Every time i start up the machine, I'd experience this major slow down along w/ almost no 'busy' noise from my hard drive.

I'm wondering if these complications are symptoms of a failing hard drive.

the machine im running is a PPC 2.3 with 2 gigs of ram and the drive im dealing with is the factory installed maxtor 233 gig.

any suggestions or ideas? thanks.

 

[arri]

that is a failing harddrive.
get you stuff off it and dump the drive.

after backing up your files you could try an 'erase' with 'zero all data' in Disk Utility to replace bad-sectors with spare-sectors, but i wouldn't trust any drive older than a year or 2 (maybe 3).

and you get a new 300Gb drive for under 60 euros..

 

[Giaguara]

Does Disk Utility find problems with this hard drive? (Applications > Utilities) SMART status?
It does sound like hardware though.