Laptop making clicking sound -- is it really hard drive failure?

Question

Okay so I have had my laptop for I believe more than a year now and my laptop has always had this clicking sound every now and then. It's very random though -- sometimes I'll get it but then it won't do it for months. I looked it up and saw it was a hard drive failure so I immediately backed up my files just in case but so far my laptop hasn't died yet or had any super bad symptoms...

I have looked up a lot of things about it and I have run the software diagnostics to check to see if my hard drive is faulty but they all check out okay (the software I used was from the DELL site and I believe I went to my BIOS and did a check up through that as well) so I'm confused if this is really hard drive failure or if there could be some other reason? I do think something is wrong though because when it does make the clicking noise, some functionality on my computer does not work such as the windows button... But if its not a big deal I don't want to waste my money buy a new one. Ideally this laptop should last me another 3 years hopefully.

I have a DELL Inspiron N5110 if it helps. Any advice would be most appreciative.

Solution

It could be signs of the hard disk failing, or it could be something else - like aggressive power management parking the heads.

Comments

[Paul]

@aug If you are not sure about your hard disk, make sure your backups are up to date before running any kind of diagnostic tool

[aug]

@cybernard Any mhdd iso's you can recommend? And will do thank you so much

[aug]

@Paul yeah I make sure to back up before running them. I'll back it up again tonight :)

[cybernard]

hddguru.com/download/software/mhdd/mhdd32ver4.6iso.zip

[cybernard]

or click on this link Last version of MHDD, CDROM iso-image on hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD

[aug]

Alright I'll try to find some time to do that and get back to you. Thank you so much @cybernard :)

[Back2Basics]

A laptop parks the read head when it shakes. Do you have restless leg syndrome?

[aug]

Hmmm interesting. If it were aggressive power management, would it be something I need to worry about?

[davidgo]

Possibly not - I mention aggressive power management because it could be the heads parking. I didn't originally Google this article, but its on point - thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking