Hard drive makes clicking noises now, what should I do?

[gentoo]

The other night I went to reinstall my 200GB Western Digital hard drive since my shitty Soyo motherboard had died on me earlier that week and I replaced it with an Abit. Well, needless to say I believe I put the jumper on correctly for the "single/neutral" position of operation. I booted the system up and it worked good, took a little bit of time but the drive showed up but only as "foreign" to Windows and then soon said "error" instead. I believe that's when I heard it start to click. I rebooted rather startled and checked the jumper. In actuality I had missed the targeted setting by one pin... fuck. Fixed the jumper and started up again, this time the clicking was still there and sounded terrible. What the hell do I do now?

Basically...
Jumper fuck-up.
Clicking noise on boot up.
Continuous clicking noise now.
...
What are my options?

I know I can get the drive replaced with a swift RMA, but what about data recovery? I got this drive around October of last year and it has served me well until now, heh. Does Western Digital do platter extractions or something? Man I'd hate to loose my 40+ gigs of music but I suppose it's not the end of the world. :(

I'd greatly appreciate any help, input, or advice anyone could give me.

[dano1122]

run for cover,when that hard drive crashes, those platters are going to come flying at you like ninja stars.

[InorganicMatter]

Just back up your data to a few DVD's. Surely if you compress it you can get it down to at least half it's size. 2 DL DVD's should be sufficient.

[klowngoblin]

run for cover,when that hard drive crashes, those platters are going to come flying at you like ninja stars.


this is true!, the heads smash into the platters making jagged edges so when they fly out of the case they will rip you to shreds!,

when HDD's make the bad sector noise, its already dead... its life is down to around a couple days, some of your data may not be recoverable

you can get a program called HDTUNE, it will tell you the exact health status, and what the HDD smart thing says

[gentoo]

Well the thing is trying to access it. I can't get to Windows with it plugged in plus it seems that it doesn't have a recognizable filesystem on it. It was a dymanic NTFS filesystem before, but when I switched the jumper and then booted up, the system said it was a "foreign" filesystem. So I thought everything was ok, I just need to re-adjust it. Well, mistake realized, rebooted, fixed jumper. Now drive clicks and a Slackware Linux live-CD tells me the filesystem on it is SFS. Makes no sense at all... oh well. I've know a few people that have some utilities at their workplace.

[Dyre]

Backup your important data. then burn a bootable cd with DFT on it (like ultimatebootcd) and run the drive through the advanced test in DFT. If it fails, its done for-

[gentoo]

I've got the UBCD except where do I find this DFT? I've been mostly running the Western Digital diagnostic tools on it.

edit: Do you mean the Drive Fitness Test (IBM/Hitachi) according to the CD contents?

[SirKenin]

Typical WD. How many times have I seen this and people wonder why I hate the pieces of crap.

Your drive is going to die and in very short order, if it hasn't already. Get your important data off it IMMEDIATELY if you still can and then get that drive in to be RMAed. Do yourself a favor and tell them to give you a Maxtor DiamondMax 9 or 10 next time if that option is available to you.

[gentoo]

That is funny and thanks for crapping on my thread. It is funny because I hear that Maxtor's are crap all of the time. In actuality, I am still running on my two WD400BB's with a thrid one waiting in bay since I do not have any EIDE RAID available to me on my new motherboard. Western Digital has never failed me and I believe that this drive would not have failed me without it being on my behalf. Surely I had to have fucked up somewhere. So yeah, please bug off with your drive comparison nonsense. Some like Seagate, some like Maxtor, and some like Western Digital... like me.

[lunacite]

If it's doing the "turn signal" clicks, then it's pretty much gone, one thing I've heard to do is put it in a ziploc bag with those moisture absorbing packets that say "DO NOT EAT" on them and put it in the freezer for awhile, then try to recover your data while it's cold. I saved about 80gb of stuff that way.

[SirKenin]

That is funny and thanks for crapping on my thread. It is funny because I hear that Maxtor's are crap all of the time. In actuality, I am still running on my two WD400BB's with a thrid one waiting in bay since I do not have any EIDE RAID available to me on my new motherboard. Western Digital has never failed me and I believe that this drive would not have failed me without it being on my behalf. Surely I had to have fucked up somewhere. So yeah, please bug off with your drive comparison nonsense. Some like Seagate, some like Maxtor, and some like Western Digital... like me.
I have sold every brand of harddrive on the planet. I am qualified to tell you what is good and what isn't, because I'm the one that has to replace the dumb things. I'm the one that has to wait MONTHS to get WDs back from WD (I'm STILL waiting for a 40GB after five months). WD is crap. I don't care what anyone says. They rank right up there with Fujitsu.

You didn't do anything wrong to screw that drive up. I have seen that exact same problem with other WDs dozens of times. They are infamous for one of two things. Either it clicks like a bugger and then dies altogether or the drive corrupts and you can't even low level format it. Either way you are replacing the drive.

You do get lucky, of course, and get a good WD drive. However, in retail circles the Caviar is infamous for being junk.

The Maxtor DiamondMax9 and DiamondMax10 are two of the best value drives out there. The only one that competes is the Barracuda, with it's major strength being the five year warranty. If you want to spend some good money to get a real good drive the WD Raptor is the best Enterprise level drive going for the home user.

There are three Maxtor lines that are terrible, and they are generally the ones everyone complains about (it's their own fault though.. if they weren't so darn cheap they wouldn't have run into the problem to begin with). They are the DiamondMax8, 541DX and Fireball 3. All of these are the slimline model Maxtors, which should be avoided like a plague. The next time some kid tells you Maxtor is crap, ask him which model he has. I'll place my money on one of these three.

[SirKenin]

One more thing. Sorry if I seem too hard on your brand preference, but they have lost me plenty of money and I don't mind warning people about them. Yes, I see what little kids and fans of one particular brand write on message boards. I hear what it is you are saying. However, I'm telling you that some kid having problems with one drive doesn't mean squat in the grand scheme of things. My very profession is a technician and VAR. What this means is that my life is all about servicing and selling machines. I see literally hundreds of harddrives of all shapes and sizes in any given year. Soooo, when I give you my experience, it isn't with one lousy harddrive, nor even five. It's with hundreds of them.

When people conduct a survey, they look to work with the largest sample size possible. The reason for this is very simple. The larger the sample size, the more accurate the survey (theoretically, but other factors are involved to skew results). Thus it is in the computer world. If some burger-flipper tells me that his one Intel or AMD CPU was junk I simply disregard them. S/he has a sample size of one and that is literally meaningless. Now, if someone tells me they work in the IT department for Purolator Courier or my sales rep for one of my suppliers tells me out of every 500 drives, they have had 45 go bad on them, I tend to listen.

[gentoo]

Alright, I'll take your word for it. I base my preferences mostly with what has worked best for me and the longest. So far my three WD400BB's are still running well after a very long time.

Also, would you be able to tell me whether or not this drive is kaput? I have an old IBM Deskstar 16GP DTTA-351680 and it has worked fine before. I use it mainly in a Linux machine but I came back around to reinstall to a newer version and suddenly it craps out and gives me a long string of I/O errors and eventually causes the system to kernel panic during setup. But this only happens once I start to extract a rather large tar file like a Gentoo stage tarball or a portage tarball. Strange...

Any suggestions? :confused:

[SirKenin]

Generally the IO errors during a setup or boot process are generated due to an impending failure of the drive. I am just sitting here racking my brain of when I have seen the errors before and every instance of this that I can recall was due to a failing drive.

IBM (which are made by Hitachi incidentally) had a few bad models of drives. That particular one, however, does not ring a bell. It merely sounds like it is nearing the end of a long healthy life. Modern harddrives are good for about 600,000 hours of use, or roughly three years. The 16GP is approximately six years old. I would say that it has given you exceptional service and is now due to be replaced.

Hopefully this helps.

[towert7]

One more thing. Sorry if I seem too hard on your brand preference, but they have lost me plenty of money and I don't mind warning people about them. Yes, I see what little kids and fans of one particular brand write on message boards. I hear what it is you are saying. However, I'm telling you that some kid having problems with one drive doesn't mean squat in the grand scheme of things. My very profession is a technician and VAR. What this means is that my life is all about servicing and selling machines. I see literally hundreds of harddrives of all shapes and sizes in any given year. Soooo, when I give you my experience, it isn't with one lousy harddrive, nor even five. It's with hundreds of them.

When people conduct a survey, they look to work with the largest sample size possible. The reason for this is very simple. The larger the sample size, the more accurate the survey (theoretically, but other factors are involved to skew results). Thus it is in the computer world. If some burger-flipper tells me that his one Intel or AMD CPU was junk I simply disregard them. S/he has a sample size of one and that is literally meaningless. Now, if someone tells me they work in the IT department for Purolator Courier or my sales rep for one of my suppliers tells me out of every 500 drives, they have had 45 go bad on them, I tend to listen.


When people read a survey, they look for people who are unbiased. You my friend, seem biased.

Anyway, in the computer world, mass quantities of results don't mean *too* much, maybe simply that the general public does not pamper their hard drives and computers as much as they should... Unless there is a mechanical defect with the hard drive, there should be no reason for one to just "fail" randomly.... usually something happens to the hard drive.

So when you hear the general public say they have "spyware"... who cares. Does'nt mean their computer is bad, just that the user is not using secure settings (or as secure as can be when you did'nt write the program).

The only hard drives ive worked with that have died, are old Maxtors (just my experience)... the hard drives i personally use are pampered, and still going strong..... ^_^

[DaSmurf]

Modern harddrives are good for about 600,000 hours of use, or roughly three years. The 16GP is approximately six years old. I would say that it has given you exceptional service and is now due to be replaced.


I agree that the drive has had a long and healthy life, but that 600,000 hours = 3 years seems off by a few orders of magnitude.

600,000 hours comes out to a little over 68 years in my calculator...
If anyone ever gets a drive to last that long, it belongs in a very prestigious hall of fame.:D

[SirKenin]

I agree that the drive has had a long and healthy life, but that 600,000 hours = 3 years seems off by a few orders of magnitude.

600,000 hours comes out to a little over 68 years in my calculator...
If anyone ever gets a drive to last that long, it belongs in a very prestigious hall of fame.:D
lmao. I think I made a slight typo :p

[SirKenin]

When people read a survey, they look for people who are unbiased. You my friend, seem biased.

Anyway, in the computer world, mass quantities of results don't mean *too* much, maybe simply that the general public does not pamper their hard drives and computers as much as they should... Unless there is a mechanical defect with the hard drive, there should be no reason for one to just "fail" randomly.... usually something happens to the hard drive.

So when you hear the general public say they have "spyware"... who cares. Does'nt mean their computer is bad, just that the user is not using secure settings (or as secure as can be when you did'nt write the program).

The only hard drives ive worked with that have died, are old Maxtors (just my experience)... the hard drives i personally use are pampered, and still going strong..... ^_^
I do not like to think of myself as purposefully biased. I look to myself as speaking from years of experience. Experience has taught me that certain products need to be avoided like the plague. There is nothing I like better than to see a perfectly functioning computer and playing with fire by intentionally purchasing products that are well known to be poor in quality stands to impede that goal.

With Western Digital Caviars it is not a case of abusing the drives. They are quite simply poorly made. I have no doubt that the fellow in this thread did absolutely nothing to abuse his drive. People don't exactly sit there throwing their HDDs across the room in an attempt to see them fail.

Believe me, I have punched my case more times than I care to admit when I had the last Axp in it, but I never lost a Maxtor drive. As a matter of fact I am still using them four years later. I use the D740X drives, though, and they were Maxtor's top of the line drives (for home users) when I bought them. I also have a Raptor 74GB and so far it has proven to be amazing. It's just those damn Caviar drives that prove to be such a pain in the tush.

[gentoo]

What's so great about Seagate anyways? I have heard a few times different people saying how great Seagates are. Sure I hear that they come with awesome warranties but what does that grant you other than a new drive once yours fails? It surely doesn't guarentee you your data back. :\

I'll take a look into other hard drives once the time comes around. I'm going to continue trying to recover my data from the drive but after that I'll RMA it.

I recieved it from NewEgg.com with an extended warranty on it so what would that entitle me to? Would they only let me get the same drive again or could I dish it out for a different 200GB drive? The reason why I am asking is because I plan on getting another 200GB drive soon and running just those for system and storage and retiring my old 40GB drives for other projects.

[towert7]

What's so great about Seagate anyways?

All the ones ive had work.... and still work. That's good enough for me. Oh, and they are very quite, as are WD hard drives. So if you like quite computers, it works out good.

[gentoo]

Yeah... I should probably work more towards a quieter PC. :o

[Jawadali]

The other night I went to reinstall my 200GB Western Digital hard drive since my shitty Soyo motherboard had died on me earlier that week and I replaced it with an Abit. Well, needless to say I believe I put the jumper on correctly for the "single/neutral" position of operation. I booted the system up and it worked good, took a little bit of time but the drive showed up but only as "foreign" to Windows and then soon said "error" instead. I believe that's when I heard it start to click. I rebooted rather startled and checked the jumper. In actuality I had missed the targeted setting by one pin... fuck. Fixed the jumper and started up again, this time the clicking was still there and sounded terrible.

I'd greatly appreciate any help, input, or advice anyone could give me.

Any update to this problem?

I have a very similar issue. My drive (WD 100GB, came with a PC that I got in January of 2003) just started clicking one day, and programs were taking very long to open and close. I reset the PC, and started to send stuff over the network and back up e-mails, when the PC restarted. Now, it hangs on the windows XP loading screen (the bar that normally goes accross stops after a second or two).

I was thinking that I'd put it it in my other Windows XP machine as a secondary and try to transfer the important data to my primary drive (Maxtor 160GB).

Sorry to thread-hijack but I feel that since the probelm is so similar I'd save time not making a new thread.

Also:

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6255-5029761.html

I haven't had time to try anything myself, and probably won't have time for the next month or so.