Listening to it, there is a sliding striking sound coming from where the hardrive sits. I'm not very confident that it's going to be an easy fix.
I just hope that if it is cactus that I can rescue the stuff that is in the D: partition Most of it is backed up except some important struff I've been working on in the past month.
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.
That's what I thought too Phil, but I didn't want to believe it. It's the loss of the data I've been working on that hurts.
I don't know if it's worth getting a new HDD. It is only one of thos $899 Acers that was advertise 12 months ago. 12 months, warranty Yep that's right. 1 month and 1 week out of warranty.
I might just whip the ram out and dump it into Syas laptop (she has the same model) and keep it for parts for hers.
A 40Gb Hdd is around 85 recession riddled buckazoids. Make sure before you write off the HDD that you take the cover aff and have a look. I've recovered data from HDD's that simply had stuck platters and once the platter was rotated slightly I was able to restart the drive and recover the data. If it's only a week out of warranty it would also be worth contacting the manufacturers as sometimes they will honour the warranty if it's only a week or two over.
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Most of it is backed up except some important struff I've been working on in the past month.
It's the loss of the data I've been working on that hurts. 
Yep that's right. 1 month and 1 week out of warranty. 
