tick-tock hard drive

[Bill Raffensperger]

We've got a 14" iBook in the family. It came home from college today. 
600MHz, 20G, serial number begins RM216, so it's just about 13 months 
old. The drive seems to get stuck and makes a tick-tock sound, like a 
clock. The trouble started about two weeks ago. It boots to a flashing 
system folder. Booted from DiskWarrior (Vers 2.1), the hard drive does 
not show on the desktop (Mac OS 9.1). The program can find the drive 
and recognize its name, it gets to step 5, rebuilding directory, 
locating directory data, going really slow, at a crawl. Then the 
dreaded tick-tock crash. The drive just sounds like a loud watch, under 
the left wrist rest. It gets stuck. It is a louder click than the drive 
arm parking itself. Very regular, about 72 bpm. It'll stop now and 
then, and you can hear the drive read a bit, the screen brightness 
controls still work, the cursor moves, but it seems pretty hopeless. I 
tried placing a lamp above the wrist rest to warm the drive some, you 
know, to thin the lubrication. That seemed to help, because the first 
couple of times I booted from the CD, DiskWarrior could only see itself.

Anyone seen (or heard) of this type of drive failure? How about any 
experience with DriveSavers or like companies to get the data off the 
drive. If I send it back to Apple (I have AppleCare), can I get them to 
fix it and send be back the fubar drive? Or do they always need to keep 
the old drive? Right now it's clicking away with a heating pad (on 
medium) wrapped around the front left corner. Or should I try an ice 
pack? How about gently slapping it around? I imagine I can kiss the 
data goodbye. Just college stuff and maybe 10G of mp3s. So it's not 
life and death, but it would be nice if some heroics might work.