OT: hard drive making weird noises

Well... my old Tosiba 420 did/does that once in a while, and it's six years old. My IBM Thinkpad is over a year old - every once in a while it goes 'ka-clunk' as if some solenoid (which of course there isn't) in the HD activated. It's disconcerting, but so far innocuous. That being said - I have a cute little PCMCIA - to - HD adapter and software (Simpletech DriveLink) that does a mirror-image copy from the internal HD to another one attached to the adapter. Then you can use the new one for backup, or replace the existing one. It took about 1.5 hours to transfer 6 actual gigs of Stuff from one 20G drive to another. It cost $89 plus whatever drive you buy. Its one of those things like drive de-fragmenting - set it working one evening before you go to bed and in the morning you'll have a new back-up drive. The other thing DriveLink is good for is if you have to get a large amount of data physically transferred from one machine to another - the external drive just shows up (in Windoze, anyway) as one of the mounted devices, so you can move Humongous Files back and forth as needed. Hope this helps... Cheers John