When I was a kid I had an aging Commodore 64 and a stack of disks with pirated games. Loading games was a slow process, you'd often wait full minutes for your game to load (and this was the fast option, tapes were far worse), hoping against hope it would all work right. It would often make this sudden GROAN noise when trying to read that I assume was a sudden seek.
And when it would fail, it would make this GROAN CHK CHK CHK CHK GROAN noise. No idea what it was, but it was etched into my mind as "this load isn't going to work, this game-disk might be dead".
That failure is the "extinct sound" that's been etched into my memory.
The 1541 was too cheap to include a track-0 sensor, so when the drive didn't know where it was, it would just seek backwards against its mechanical stop, the maximum number of tracks, thus guaranteeing that wherever it had been, it was now at track 0.
Read errors would cause it to repeat this routine.
You can find 1541 videos all over youtube, including repair videos, many of which include this sound as part of the drive initialization and diagnostics.
The 1541 went through several generations and could be built with mechanisms from several different manufacturers, which will change the timbre of the sound. So will the table that the drive is sitting on, for that matter.
When I was a kid I had an aging Commodore 64 and a stack of disks with pirated games. Loading games was a slow process, you'd often wait full minutes for your game to load (and this was the fast option, tapes were far worse), hoping against hope it would all work right. It would often make this sudden GROAN noise when trying to read that I assume was a sudden seek.
And when it would fail, it would make this GROAN CHK CHK CHK CHK GROAN noise. No idea what it was, but it was etched into my mind as "this load isn't going to work, this game-disk might be dead".
That failure is the "extinct sound" that's been etched into my memory.