hard drive noise

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brian Ferrell
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Brian Ferrell

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I'm experiencing a squealing/rubbing noise that sounds like an unlubricated bearing in the hard drive. This usually occurs at a restart and then the machine won't boot up. I get 3 different messages. One says, 'Disk boot Failure. Insert recovery boot disk', another says, 'Primary Drive fails' and the third says, 'On your last reboot your CPU hung at an improper speed' and asks that I confirm the proper speed. I usually have to turn off the PC and wait for it to cool down before I can boot up again. Now, though, when I tried to insert a sixth audio track to a project in Sonar, the PC froze and started making the same noise after which I had to turn it off and then it wouldn't reboot until I let it cool off again. Has anyone else had this problem? It's a Maxtor 30GB 7200 RPM drive and both my PC's manufacturer and Maxtor's tech support said it's a blown drive. If it is blown, I have to return it to Maxtor for replacement, which means I have to save files. I don't want to lose the project I have in progress but it's in 24 bit and if I burn it to CD I have to change it to 16 bit, which means that when I get the new hard drive, I'll have to dump the 16 bit saved project back into Sonar and I'll have lost the extra sound quality forever, right? :(
 
Burn it to CD as data, not audio, and you won't have to worry about resolution.

Yeah, any time a drive makes clicking or grinding noises it's going to fail and fail soon. Maxtor has a good replacement policy, very fast....just follow the instructions.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Do you have any other way of backing up your data? Do you have another hard drive in your system that has enough space to support all of what you have to back up? If you do, transfer all of your files from the failing drive to the good drive. But you should definetely backup your shit before your drive fails. Sounds like a bad situation. How old is the drive, anyway?
 
Thanks for your quick replies guys. I was hopin' that it might be something else, but I guess you've confirmed a bad drive. The drive (and PC) is only 2 years old but I think because I had so many problems with the video card, CD writer, tower and soundcard, the constant stopping and restarting put extra wear and tear on it. I bought the PC for the purpose of recording, but the sad thing is; I've just now actually started to record. Maxtor will send another drive before I send this one in so maybe I can back it up on that one, then send the old one back. They'll charge me for it until they get the defective one back. Thanks a lot for the tips on back-up. It's good to know that the bit resolution won't be lost. I can't believe the problems I've had with this- it's like a comedy.
 
Thanks for the tip. I don't know if they'll let me upgrade since this one's still under warranty, but it sounds like it's worth a try. Hopefully the liquid bearing will last longer, too.
 
They won't let you upgrade, but the good news is that you'll get a drive that's at least as good as the one you send back...in other words, it's not uncommon to get back a higher capacity drive if they don't have your capacity in stock!

Slackmaster 2000
 
Yeah, so I found out when I called them tonight. Hopefully this drive will be out of date- it was manufactured June 20, 2000. Slack, while you're paying attention........ if I add another 7200 RPM hard drive now, do you think my 250 watt case will be able to handle both drives? I have 2 sound cards (hoontech C-Port and SBlive platinum), a video card, a DVD player and a CD-RW already installed. Also.... 650 PIII. I'm finally coming around to your old advice to use 2 drives.
 
You should be fine. Most people recommend 300W supplies at a minimum because a) they're not really much more expensive and b) a power supply tends to deliver better power when your actual draw is farther away from its rated maximum. On paper you could probably get away with a 200W supply, although you do increase your chances of having an instable system.

So, it might work fine and it might not work fine. The only way to tell is to do it! Power supply problems look like this:

- Machine restarts itself.
- Machine dies any time the power flickers even a tiny bit.
- Windows hard locks (total system freeze)
- Problems booting.
- Problems with devices reinitializing. For instance, if you hear your hard drive spin up after the system is already running, it's a bad sign. This could lead to data corruption of course.

(FYI 1, 3, and 4 are also indicators of memory and CPU problems)

The chances of you doing major damage are very slim, so just give it a shot. I'm running off a 250W supply and my system is way more loaded than yours!

Slackmaster 2000
 
O, Great Slack! Thanks for thine wisdom! Thanks also for listing the related symptoms of being under-powered. :)
 
Well the new drive is installed and all the files are transferred from the old drive. Thanks so much to everyone for all your advice and encouragement. As you said, Slack, Maxtor quickly sent me the same model as a replacement (shucks, I was hopin' for a better one ;-). I had quite a few problems installing both drives for file transfer, some of which were related to my video card which seems to need reseating every time I do something inside the tower. Matters were made confusing by 4 different tech support guys at Maxtor. One guy said that the jumpers on the old drive should be set to slave while the other guys said they should both be set to master. It finally worked with both set to master. I had to keep changing the primary and secondary cables from one drive to the other trying to make things work, when I should've been told that the problem was that I was in need of MaxBlast software at the 'Disk Boot Failure. Insert System Boot Disk' screen. Eventually I was told this, but not before hours of screwing around. One guy didn't even seem to know this. I'm still grateful that I had their tech support to talk to. They were relatively easy to get thru to with very short waiting times.

MaxBlast is cool software. It even allows for hard drive partitioning. Once I got to the MaxBlast, everything went smoothly except having to make the decision whether to partition the new drive or not. I didn't.

If I add a new drive for my non-recording tasks, is it best to put it on the Secondary IDE and the recording drive on the Primary? 2 drives should save wear and tear on the 7200 RPM recording one, right?
 
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