The Hard drive in my desktop PC wont boot windows anymore and when it starts it makes a klinking noise 3 or 4 times then says boot error. Is my hdd fried?

Yeah, bad sector or HDD Failure, you can read more about it here: http://askbobrankin.com/hard_drive_makes_a...king_sound.html

I was a afraid it was fried. Oh well its just files I guess.

The klunk of death.. happened to me once, however being a compaq it lived on for another 6 months, before finally kicking the bucket. Gave me time to save the files I wanted.

See if it sounds like any of these:

http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

You can try freezing it (put it in the freezer) and sometimes you can get some more life out of it, maybe enough to recover files. You will have to keep moving it back to the freezer every time it gives up though. I know this sounds weird but sometimes it works, if it's already broken you don't have much to lose though right?

I had a hard drive do this and I let it sit on the shelf for awhile and now it works O_o I use it in my PS2 now. Maybe the head got stuck and it just needed to be banged around a bit. I'm not really expecting it to last much longer though. So I guess you could try banging it on a desk or something although I only really put it on a shelf, maybe it fell over or something.

Ya my sound was in the list, Bad heads it says is the problem. I'll freeze it & see what happens but if I lost it all.....well oh well

Sorry to bump an old thread, But just recently a very old harddrive here was klunking, Well I thought ok the drive is going to die.
But I changed the PSU for another reason and the harddrive stopped kunking lol.....

My "dodgy" noise was actually were the PSU was seated one of the metal "tiny" shelfs were about half a mil from the PSU base and it gave me the god awfull grnding sound - i still havnt got round to fixing it.

I know its a very old thread, just want to say try to scan the hard disk with the (error-checking) tool from microsoft windows (right click on patition -propertis- then -tools-
that off course if you can see the partition (with this way I fixed two non working hard disk
hope it was helpfull