Ha, back in 1995 I could HEAR in advance when my PC was going to crash. I could tell from the certain crunching / grinding sounds of the hard disk. I could hear it and think "Uh oh, here comes a crash..." And then blue screen of death.
Back when I had a PC which was somewhat capable of playing games I would play Left 4 Dead in cooperative mode. You play along with three other players, and navigate the levels attempting to move from one safe room to another, fighting a hoarde of infected. The game attempts to keep the players moving by adding "special" infected, which have different abilities and are good at forcing the team to leave the current area.
One of the special infected was the Tank, which is quite strong and can throw chunks of pavement. I always knew when he was coming because my PC was kind of weak and the fans would go nuts about 30 seconds before he made an entrance. The other players were surprised that I had a sixth sense when it came to knowing when it was happening.
Too much HDD noise was also a really good indication that your computer ran out of memory and stuff is being moved into swap. I remember some occasions where I would alt-tab from a game in Windows 98 and my computer would freeze for half a minute (while doing concerning HDD noises) until I regained control of the desktop.
On the Commodore 64, you knew your floppy was bad when the drive would reset itself, slamming the read/write head against the stop repeatedly. “tick-tick-tick-tick-BRRRAAAAAAP” ... eventually knocking the head out of alignment, requiring a hardware fix (not a difficult fix, but tedious). Copy protection was notorious for causing drive knocking, so people often used cracked versions of games they purchased just to prevent it (they tended to load much faster too).
The 1541 doesn't have a track 0 sensor, so they send it 40 step commands to move it back to 0. If it wasn't already on track 40, it will just bump against the stop repeatedly. I've never heard of it damaging the drive though.
My own 1541 never actually had problems, but it was folklore on BBS's, and I saw it happen with my brother's drive. Was easy enough to service though, just loosen a couple screws, nudge the motor a teensy bit, run a diagnostic disk, and repeat ... many many times. They might have just been prone to misalignment anyway, but the knocking couldn't possibly have helped.
