Hard drive making funny noise

  • Thread starter Thread starter Whoopysnorp
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Whoopysnorp

Whoopysnorp

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Lately my PC has started hanging for a while at bootup at the stage where it says "detecting IDE drives". There are some funny squeaky noises, and eventually there's a spinning-up sound and a click, and then the drives are displayed like normal. Sometimes the spinning-up doesn't happen until the Windows XP loading screen comes up. I am positive that this is coming from my audio hard drive. This seems to be getting worse. Is this drive hosed?
 
Uh-oh! My harddrive did this, last year. 3 days later it died.... BACK UP NOW!!!!
 
Yup, sounds like a hard drive that's about to die.
 
It's a goner. Attempt an advanced warranty exchange with the manufacturer. They'll send you a replacement and you'll have 30 days to ship the defective drive back. During this time you can copy the old drive data to the new.

Do it soon, you may only have minutes left. Back up any critical data right now. If it goes before you get everything off, get EZ Recovery from (i think) ontrack. I've used it to recover files from bad drives in the past with some luck.

Make sure it's the drive though...unplug the drive and let the machine post...see if the sound is still there or gone.

Slackmaster 2000
 
I was afraid of that. I've been ignoring this noise for quite some time now, but I think the drive's days are definitely numbered. It's a Maxtor. Has anybody else had problems with their drives in the past? Any recommendations of solid brands?

I don't think I have any ghost of a warranty left; I got the drive about a year and a half ago, if I recall.
 
Maxtor might replace it, I don't think it's much over a year they implemented the 1 year warranty on some drive models. Check it out online www.maxtor.com you can type in the serial number and get the info, and whether they will issue an RMA. You will need to run some diagnostic bullshit first, get an error code. They make you jump through hoops these days.

Backup your data FIRST.

All drives can and will fail.

I like Seagate these days, although I had a brand new one get bad sectors after 3 weeks. That can happen with any brand though.

Just the way it is with electronics. That's why backing up data is important.
 
Now that's interesting...the drive in question was the master on one of my IDE channels, with a DVD-ROM drive as the slave. I took the DVD drive off so I could put on a spare hard drive I had laying around in order to back up the files on the bad drive, and now it acts completely normal at bootup. I'll see what happens when I put the DVD drive back on. I checked Maxtor's website, and apparently it's under warranty until some time in 2004, so I've got some time to play with.
 
That's usually your hard drive saying
"look dude, I'm about to fail, so don't say I didn't warn ya"

You never know tho, maybe it's just a loose cable?
 
I wonder. After messing with the cables a little bit as described above, I put everything back as it normally is (I did not move or even touch the affected hard drive at all), and now everything's running like a top. Well, as I said, it's under warranty until 2004, so I've got time to see if it fails. I even have another PC I can back up to now, so that's not a worry.
 
Be careful dude...

This happens sometimes...especially if you have power problems. Moving the drive around or chaning supplies can sometimes make the drive appear to be functioning normally....then one day, crap.

My wife had a maxtor in a system with a cheap crappy P/S recently and the drive started making noise. Against my better judgement, I decided to replace the power supply first (since the drive didn't make noise in my machine). Replacing the supply kept the drive pretty silent for about two weeks, then one day during bootup "INVALID BOOT DEVICE". Fun stuff.

Backup!

And Maxtor is still my favorite brand. I've had a couple die on me, but at no where's near the rate at which Western Digital and some others have failed. Plus they have the best exchange policies.

Slackmaster 2000
 
I'm all backed up, so it's cool. It's not the drive on which my O/S is stored, either, so if it goes tits up it's not that big of a deal. I'm not in the middle of any projects right now, though soon I'll be starting a few. I'll be watchful. I doubt it'd do much good to ask for an exchange right now, though, because I can't really claim it's doing anything wrong at the mo.
 
See the nice thing about Maxtor is that you don't need a reason for the exchange. It's a completely online process...painless. I'd recommend it.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Let me make this unnanimous.... "It's (going to be) dead, Jim".

I own more Maxtor drives than any other. Like Slack says, they have the best exchange system of any manufacturer. You don't have to exchange it now, but BACK IT UP NOW!
 
RWhite said:
Let me make this unnanimous.... "It's (going to be) dead, Jim".

I own more Maxtor drives than any other. Like Slack says, they have the best exchange system of any manufacturer. You don't have to exchange it now, but BACK IT UP NOW!
Click to expand...

As I said...it's backed up and safe. I appreciate the proxy horror you guys feel at having another homereccer possibly lose his data, but no worries.
 
well, why we're here, make sure to properly "cool" your next drive, and never bang or drop a drive, it's a gonner if not at that moment a few weeks surely... just a thought...

and low level format the drive before you ship back, do it twice if you had very personal data on the drive, do a google for swipe" or such...

anyone can read any "just" delieted data on a drive with the right software, you need to write 0 or 1s over the entire drive to deliete it competely.... formating it twice wouldn't hurt a thing, if it last through the first format that is...
 
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