Hard drive making odd sounds...

[adamwalker13]

My harddrive is a Seagate Baracuda SATA 160gb 7200rpm. It has been working well until now... It no longer boots, and when I set it as slave, and start from another operating system, I cannot access the data on it. When I try to access it, it makes an odd sound. The best way to describe this is : tick, tick (pause) tick, tick, large grind. I know the easy option is to buy a replacement, I was just wondering if there was any way to fix this problem?

 

[LWComputingMVP]

When a drive starts clicking like that you typically have no choice but to replace the drive. See if it's still under warranty. (I've called companies before and sometimes the techs can hear the drive over the phone, when they do, they usually (in my experience) don't even bother to troubleshoot it, they just start writing up the RMA).

I HAVE seen rumors that putting the drive in the freezer for a time and taking it out can TEMPORARILY solve this, but I've never tried it and I've also heard this is a myth... so... your call.

 

[adamwalker13]

I just low leveled the drive, and it was working temporarily.. The smart data from the drive is as follows:

Attribute Current Worst Raw Note
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Att: 1 Read error rate 39 39 9202712
Att: 3 Spin up time 97 96 0
Att: 4 Number of spin-up times 100 100 25
Att: 5 Reallocated sectors count 94 94 266
Att: 7 Seek error rate 100 253 607773
Att: 9 Power-on time 100 100 6
Att: 10 Spin-up retries 100 100 0
Att: 12 Start/stop count 100 100 37
Att: 194 HDA Temperature 44 46 44 (44 degrees)
Att: 195 Hardware ECC recovered 45 42 34971660
Att: 197 Current pending sectors 100 92 3
Att: 198 Offline scan UNC sectors 100 92 3
Att: 199 Ultra ATA CRC Errors 200 200 0
Att: 200 Write error rate 100 253 0
Att: 202 Unknown 91 244 9

I think I'm gonna go ahead and try the freezer thing. I can replace the hard-drive, no problem. But I'd like to try and fix this...

 

[LWComputingMVP]

Some "documentation":

http://www.meetmyattorney.com/slink/mt-archives/000275.html

http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread9069.html