Click.. click noise from hard drive ?? Please help...

[Guest_imported]

_After running for a while ( from 15 minutes to 3 hours ), my hard drive ( Western Digital 205AA ) made regular click.. click .. noise (at a rate about once per second) then the system eventually hang after 10-15 minutes .

_ If I shut down then start up again, the system is back to normal ...until the next round of clicking noise comes up again ! The time interval to the next noise crisis appears random !

My questions :
_ Where does this noise come from inside the HD?

_ How do I fix this annoying problem ?

 

[CitrixEngineer]

Without knowing any more about your system and what you're running, I'd suspect that the disk is about to die - this looks on the surface to be a hardware failure.

It's possible that the disk is getting hot, since this issue seems to surface after a period of time. You could try using a hard disk cooling device.

Here are some examples and information;

http://www.national-tech.com/catalog/harddiskcooler.htm

http://www.fast-mhz.com/reviews/cooler/hd_coolers/ultra_thin_hd_cooler/ultra_thin_page1.htm

http://www.targetpc.com/hardware/faceoffs/hd_cooling/

I would, however, recommend performing an immediate backup, and replacing the disk.

You could then reformat the old disk and try using various tools to bring it back to life. If you can't, your system is still safe. If you can, you've got a bonus backup disk (although I wouldn't store anything important on it).

Good Luck!

 

[Zorlod]

Yep, it's standing on its last leg. It sounds to me like your logic controller is going out. Like Citrix said, immediate backup! Maybe you could even get a drive image from it to load on a new hd before it finally gives out on ya. You could try to run a defrag to squeeze a bit more life out of it. I'm sorry, its never good to hear that something so close to you has a "terminal illness" *comfort's caclo*

 

[edfair]

Don't even take time for defrag. The time and agitation on the disks may be the last time you have for backup.
It is trying to recalibrate when it can't find something and is hitting mechanical stops.
Usually a symptom that the board can't decode stuff coming from the heads. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Guest_imported]

Thanks for your quick responses which really scare me out of my wits!!
A HD conks out is the worst possible scenario !
Now, I'm not even sure it is due to heat (as suggested by the kind CitrixEngineer) as the HD made its noise right off the bat after start-up this morning! It is getting more random when the noise starts.. But I still could not believe this might happen to a 1.5 year old Western Digital HD. You go for the best and now this!!
I'll will keep you guys posted of its anticipated demise...
I'll backup as kindly advised...

__I like to add : all this happened after I switched to DSL internet connection with Sympatico from dial-up connection.
Could there be a cause-effect from this ?

Thanks, 10^6.

 

[edfair]

No cause-effect. Sorry to scare you. I lost one on a server a week and a half ago with similar sounds, got 15 minutes into backup when it quit reading period.
Sometimes known as buzzard luck.
There are side benefits. You get to set it up the way it is supposed to be, which is never how it was before. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Zorlod]

We have a server where we store all of our autocad drawings on here, and last november, the scsi hard drive went out. And the guy had no backups. Its not actually the IT dept server, just a guys comp everyone in that plant uses. So we put a new one in, under warranty, then 7 months later that one conked out on us, and this time he had backups, but not of the right stuff...Heck sometimes we get brand new drives in that dont work. That is why backups are so crucial to have. Now every computer that comes in, after we tweak it and install policies etc., we make an image and save it on cd. It is still the responsibility of the owner to backup their data though.

 

[edfair]

Backup means a totally different thing to somebody who has lost a hard drive to a catastrophic failure. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Guest_imported]

Hello,

Thank you very much for your advices which were all correct : my HD suffered unrepairable defects in one partition. I ran surface tests using : Fix-it 3.0, Norton Utilities 2001 and"Data LifeGuard Tools" ( a Western Digital specific HD utility, downloadable from

http://www.westerndigital.com).

They all froze at about 60% completion! Data Lifeguard Tools indicated a replacement would be in order ! Thanks goodness , this HD is just 50% into its 3 year warranty period!

The strange thing was the HD still worked after a shut-dowm and start-up for some random period of time until the clicking noise occured. I was lucky to be able to backup all essential files on a CD-RW . But it was still a major pain with about 16 gigs of data!

That's my sad story... Hope my experience could be of some help to others.. Again, my thanks to : Citrix, Edfair and
Zorlod for your kind words of wisdom.

 

[spazzo]

I concur with all the provious advice. We just sent a 20GB Western Digital (manufactured Aug 2000) back that fried after sounding like a crazed turn signal. It was HOT! Once it starts clicking it's like a bomb counting down. You never know how long it will last. This one started sporadic clicking a couple months ago. It got worse and worse until it was constant and the drive destructed even as scandisk ran.

 

[teknoguy]

in my opinion WD drives have a very speratic lifetime. ive seen more WD drives fail then any other. i personally like Maxtor drives.

 

[basweek]

I recently installed a lot of 20 (205AA)WDs and two of them have already died with the same symptoms that you just decribed. The drive should still be under waranty. WD is very good about replacing faulty drives.