Stop, Click, Restart

[waz]

One of my hard drives sounds like it stops, makes a clicking / popping noise and then my system reboots itself. Then after the BIOS detects all the drives upon rebooting I hear the drive spin up again and life is back to normal. It happens so randomly and fairly infrequently so it’s very hard to pin point which drive it is. I have a 60gb Maxtor and a 180 GB Western Digital. The funny thing is I dual boot Windows XP one for work applications and one for games, and it only happens on the game install. The only difference between the 2 driver wise is video card drivers.

Anyone got some suggestions on what could be causing this and a way to stop it? With the WoW server queues so bad on my server one restart like that and I’m done raiding for the night.

 

[waz]

It hasn't happened since I posted this but I’m still interested in what the problem is...

 

[dirtydr]

I'd try running the manufacturers diagnostic app on both drives. What you are describing usually means a drive is headed south. It may continue like this for months with minimal problems then again it could go tits up tomorrow. I'd also do a backup right now if you have the ability to do so.

 

[Leonard]

I had something like this problem on a Maxtor drive last year. It would click away.. sometimes the system would boot ok.. but usually after a few minutes it would reboot. It was really intermittent though. But the drive had some pretty important data on it that I needed to take off. Eventually, I found something on a different forum which suggested that the drive heads may be sticking.. and one of the suggestions was to stick the whole drive in a anti static bag and put it in the freezer!! Scary!

Seeing as the computer I was trying to fix was already stored in a freezing cold room and the problem still occured, I took the hard drive and placed it on a central heating radiator for half an hour. It worked fine. (Long enough to copy all the data off onto a new drive)

When the drive cooled down and I started the computer it stuck again.

I assume it was the drive heads sticking and the slight temperature change was enough to un-stick them.

The original drive is now in the bin! Turning on the S.M.A.R.T option in Bios warned that the drive was due to fail soon and I certainly didn't trust it even after a complete reformat.