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The sound you are describing sounds to me like a head that has crashed and is scraping the disk, if that's the case you can forget the second partition. Sometimes the platters stop revolving and the heads hunt trying to read. I have an ancient NEC laptop that does this and I can generally coax the platters in to turning by removing the disk and giving the HDD a rapid rotational twist so that the platters inertia coupled with rotation of the case frees the sticking. On the bright side HDD's are cheap as chips, the time taken to reload everything and the loss of valuable data is the problem.
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