Hard Drive Short Circuit?

[Sheow]

I was setting up a new PC and switching components back and forth a lot. I'd just put this new Western Digital 120JB in that had been working up until now, and I switch on the PC, and it makes this weird power-up then power-down sound, and there's this strange clinking sound I guess, this goes on for maybe 5 seconds, then the power goes off.

I try again, it's similar, the monitor maybe green lights for a second, then goes off again. Doesn't get close to POSTing. I try again, nothing happens at all. I switch hard drives, and everything is fine. When I unplug the PSU cord, I hear strange crackly (electricity type?) sounds (edit: coming from the PSU where I'm plugging the cord in).

What happened? Is the hard drive dead? And how did it die? Luckily it was new so had no data to be lost..

Thanks in advance for replies.

[dandragonrage]

It's not really possible to say what happened. Too many things could have happened. It does sound like a short is very likely. You can use an ohmmeter to find out for sure if you like (this is done with power off).

Static is kind of strange to be made, though. If you're hearing popping and clicking static noise, that is usually only high voltage. So I dunno what that sound would be....

However, I do have some advice that I am certain of... RMA that bitch and get a Seagate or Samsung drive!

[travisw111]

WTF man, the same thing happened today, although my drive(same exact drive)had been about 2 years old. Anyway, I leave my computer on for a few hours, come back, and the damn thing is clicking and making death sounds. I couldn't get anything off of it, but I can get it to show up in the bios sometimes, and it'll just freeze it up usually before windows and go into PIO mode. Sometimes I made it into windows, but it was unrecognizable and I couldn't do the WD utility tests without the damn thing freezing.

I tried the freezer trick which worked... for about 30 seconds. I got it in ultra dma, it booted fast, I got the most important stuff I could find fast, but I lost all my movies and everything else.

I'm still trying to fix it so I can get a little more things off of it. It'll still show up in the bios, and if I do the freezer trick, sometimes it'll show up in windows

[O[H]-Zone]

I worked on a buddy's machine recently. I was an old POS...the HD had died, and I figured I'd just drop a new one in an set up Win98 for him. Borrowed an old POS 4 GB from another buddy, and connected it. When I turned it on, the HD started "clunking" internally. And it was dead...I tested it in another machine before I put it in, and it was working. Something in the IDE controller flipped (I figure), and it was instructing the drive to beat itself to death. I gave him an old P2-400 I had laying around (with Win2000 on it), so he didn't care, but it was pretty strange.

[Sheow]

Thanks.. does anyone think it might have done something to the PSU? That crackly sound can't be good..

[dandragonrage]

Is there a strange sound with the hard drive gone?

[Sheow]

Okay, I replaced the hard drive with the same model, and the problem is still happening. This after the PC had been sitting on for a few days running fine with a different hard drive.

My guess is now that the asshole PSU was stuffed, and only works with selected hard drives just to confuse my troubleshooting. This was the PSU used in my main computer for years, I guess it suddenly broke when I was moving the case around? I'll put in a new one and see what happens.

[Sheow]

Replaced the PSU, and all is fine now.