Strange click/failed to boot

[Dougjwjr]

A friend of mine is having a strange problem where his computer will make a clicking sound 6 times, then a pause, then 2 more times, followed by it saying it failed to boot, insert disk. I took a listen, and it would appear to me to be coming from the hard drive. I entered the bios and changed the boot to hard drive only, seeing as his disk drive has problems of it's own that I haven't looked into yet.

Now, the strange thing to me is once in a while, after many tries, it will do 1 click then as it does another, it stops, and it will work. It seems to me as if something must be turning in the hard drive and it fails until it reaches a certain place, but it just seems odd. Has anyone experienced this before, or have any input?

 

[Nenu]

Hard disk is suffering/dying.
The data is magnetic and the magnetic field at some points isnt strong enough.
Magnetism does fade over time so it isnt always destructive.
A refresh of the data may be required or if that area of the drive is becoming un-usable, it can be mapped out and a spare sector used.

Plug the drive into another PC and run scandisk, "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" .
Its very likely it will find bad sectors and will map them out.
Any data on the bad sectors will hopefully be fully recovered, there is a chance you can lose data though.
Too many bad sectors and the drive will be declared unfit for use.

Sometimes what appear to be very serious problems can be fixed with decent tools.
Use HDD Regenerator or Spinrite to recover the drive if you are stuck and must get the data off or want to try and keep the drive running.
These tools try rewriting the repaired data and can recover bad sectors back into use again.
This can make a previously un-usable drive into a perfectly usable one again, depending on the issue.