Tips and tricks for identifying the dying hard drive

Poor man's stethoscope: Long'ish screwdriver. Tip on the drive, handle on your ear. Listen to each drive. If either clicks you should be able to quickly isolate it.

(Works great with valve-covers on your old cars when listening for valve noise too ;-) )

Of course, this assumes clearance and common sense about where on the drive you touch...

An old back-woods mechanic trick can come in handy for this kind of thing. I once saw an old mechanic old a long straight stick hard against the palm of his hand and then press his knuckle up against his ear. He placed the other end of the stick on parts of the engine and could hear which cylinder was not firing correctly. Wood conducts sound well if it has no gap air gap to jump. If your old enough you might remember in movies a cowboy putting his ear to the train track to tell if a train is coming or the Indian listening to the ground to hear the buffalo. The same principle applies here. As crazy as this sounds you can use it to track down the clicking sound, give it a try.

Looking in the event log, you should have an event from the disk source:

Log: System
Source: disk
Event ID: 7
Message: The device, \Device\Harddisk4\DR3, has a bad block.

And then to identify DR3, you find Disk 3 in Disk Management: