How do I know if my Harddrive is dying?

[coachingguy]

I've got a 2.0 gig G5 20" iMac that has been acting up lately. It's crashed with no forewarning twice now in about a month. The machine will just lock up or won't open any new apps. They'll bounce as if they were opening but nothing will happen. When I restart, I get the blue screen. Last time I Fsk'd and ran the install disk to check the hard drive, it tested fine, I corrected permissions, finally I had to reinstall OS X.4.

This morning it happened again. I don't want to go through all the hassel of the resinstalling the OS again, if it's the harddrive.

Let me know what I need to look for.

Thanks

Coachingguy

[mad jew]

Well you can use Disk Utility to verify the drive, before going through the repair rigmarole. Have you done that since the last install? Also, did you reformat the drive during the last install? :)

[Sun Baked]

Clicking of the drive, and sudden freezing of the machine are two signs of the HD going bad.

The sad thing is that SMART doesn't always say the drive is dying.