Western Digital Protege failing?

[Lukeno1]

Just bought a new, second computer (about 3 days ago). Was working fine until about an hour ago, when the computer froze just after installing a program. Rebooted, went into Scandisk, where it froze at 79%. Went into the Win98 setup disk, that Scandisk got to 92% where it promptly froze again. Deleted the partition, attempted to reformat it. Gave up after a couple of minutes of non-progress. Swapped the connectors on the drive with another part of the IDE cable, then another IDE cable on the other bus - no change. At one point it was making an audible squeak-type noise, and every now and again would spin down, the head would clack, it would spin up again and continue to make the noise. This issue was fixed by turning off the computer, waiting for the computer to naturally spin the hard drive down, then rebooting. At one point it wouldn't even get seen in BIOS. Now, BIOS sees it correctly, but an attempt at formatting has got to the heady heights of 3% after about 15 minutes. The hard drive always made a loud "clack" from the head when it initially spun up, before instantly shutting up. Now it makes some other indescribable noises after that when starting up. Oddly, my CD-ROM drive also has been noisier since I swapped the IDE ribbon cables around, but that's not a major issue. The other IDE bus works fine, as it now runs the CD-ROM drive, as its old cable does.

Is the hard drive dead or dying? I can't actually hear a "click of death", but the HDD light is permanently off.

EDIT: It was far from fast formatting originally (even for a 5.4k rpm drive), but it actually did format. Still stuck on 3%.

[osprey4]

I think I'd give up and get a new drive.