Hard drive occasionally makes clanking noise.

[BlueGuy]

I have a Dell PII with a Maxtor 40 GB 7200 Hard Drive I replaced about 3 months ago. The drive will make a clanking noise (similar to when my other drive crashed) about every 5 to 20 minutes (this time varies). Is it possible that an arm is hitting one of the platters, but not completely crashing the drive. When I try to run Norton Disk Doctor I get the message "NDD cannot obtain the physical disk characteristics of hard disk 2 and is unable to test the partition information of the drive."
Thanks for any info you can provide!

 

[edfair]

Not a head problem, they aren't heavy enough to make the noise. More likely you are losing voice coil drive and the heads are spring loaded to return to the park position.
No matter what the source they aren't supposed to make that noise and it is only a matter of time till the drive crashes, either from a permanent failure of whatever, or the heads going out of alignment. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
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