When I boot my computer up in the morning, my hard drive(Maxtor 500 GB) makes random clicks as it loads windows. I never seem to notice it making those sounds once windows is booted up or if I restart the computer after it has been running for a while. Only when it starts up cold. I have also noticed that occasionally the MSE icon won’t load into the tray, even though the program is running and is set to display in the tray. A restart fixes that issue.
Is there something wrong with my drive? Should I be looking into buying a new drive and having the old one copied over to it? Or is this nothing to really worry about? It has been doing this since at least June of 2011 with no changes.
At a minimum backup the data you do not want to lose. You might even want to clone your HDD to another HDD. It sounds like yours is dying.