Rattling Commodore 1541

I have owned a 64 and a 1541 disk drive for some time now and have heard some loud rattling noises coming from my drive. I often hear this noise when finding errors in copy-protected programs. Is this noise harmful to the disk drive?

Harvard Prossfete

The noise that you have been hearing is the disk drive's head rattling while attempting to read a block with an error. Usually the drive will attempt to read a bad block three times before giving up and printing an error message. This kind of rattling will eventually knock your disk drive's head out of alignment, causing problems with SAVEs and LOADs.

It is best to avoid searching for errors in copyprotected programs.