Hard Drive making weird noise

Hard to tell what the problem is without hearing it. You should bring it in to an Apple store to have it checked out.

 

If your computer was overheating, it would shut down, it's normal for it to feel warm to the touch. Make sure you have a proper backup, your hard drive may be on its way out.

 

I imagine that, if it was the hard drive, you could replace it yourself. You can find hard drives on almost any online technology retailer. I'd try Amazon. However, make sure you know that it is a hard drive problem before you go about replacing it.

 

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4S: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

If you have access to a PC and can connect the HDD to it, I recommend getting the FreeDOS program Spinrite. It's a hard drive recovery and maintenance tool.

If your HDD is making those noises, it's demise may be near. Run that program and it may do 1 of 2 things. It may repair it altogether, or buy you more time to get a new HDD and move your data over to it.

 

--- Post Merged, Nov 16, 2016 ---

Is there anything else I can use instead of spin rite- I only have another mac I can use - no PC

 

[edit, just realized this was from 5 years ago ]


Odd hard drive sounds are never good. I see an SSD upgrade in your future!

Also, are you sure its the hard drive? A spinning scratching noise could also be a fan. You did mention it was getting a little warmer than normal...