[mr. burns]

a while ago certain songs in my itunes library suddenly started locking up itunes leading to the entire system locking up. i have my mp3s on a seperate HD in a 5gb partion. that partition is full, only 8MB left. when a song locks up, itunes freezes and the HD starts making a kinda of chirp noise every 3 seconds or so. this gives me a ~5 second window to quickly switch over to itunes and do a command Q, otherwise the entire system becomes bogged down to the point where i can't do a thing but move my mouse cursor around.
is this related to the HD partition being full or are these certain songs of mine becoming corupt?

[baw]

I would open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder, click on your external drive listed in the Disk Utility window and check the S.M.A.R.T. status.

[mr. burns]

eek. it says it's failing. it's the original drive that came with my gigabit dual G4. guess it's time to back up and retire it.

thanks.