TechRepublic has published a
checklist for troubleshooting hard drive failures. This is a very good paper, in PDF format, and I recommend downloading
and printing it out for future use --
You must
print this, because if you just save it, and your drive failes, you can't access the document to run through the checklist.
If you don't have a PDF reader (such as Adobe), you can download the latest at Adobe.com.