What does it sound like when a head hits the disk?

[Soulburner]

Is it sort of a quick metallic screech? If so, our Dell E1505 is about to bite the dust...it started doing this today sporadically. WD Diagnostics failed both the quick and extended tests saying there are bad sectors that could possibly be repaired but the data would be lost. Haven't gotten any sort of warning from the SMART monitoring though.

I'm backing up the whole computer now and I will try to repair the sectors after, but this doesn't look good

Just for reference it uses a SAMSUNG 60gb drive. I actually like this drive because its no slouch for a laptop and its extremely quiet, this notebook doesn't "crunch" at all compared to most laptops that I have used.

[Sparky]

Why are you using WD tools on a samsung drive?

A metallic screech strikes me as a head crash, that is what an induced head crash was like when I was playing with an old 1GB drive I had opened up. I'd get your data off it and RMA the drive. SMART is stupid really, told me a drive was fine when it obviously had the click of death and had totally dumped half the data on the drive.

[Soulburner]

Yeah, I have never heard it before but when I did, it immediately set an alarm in my head and that is the first thing I thought of. I got out the 500gb MyBook immediately. She does have 1 year warranty on this notebook I believe and she got it in October so we should be ok and hopefully I can prevent my girlfriend from losing any data.

It shouldn't matter who makes the drive, its a hard disk scanning/diagnostic tool.