Question Grinding only on Startup?

Amoninuse

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Jun 8, 2015
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When I start my PC there is a blood-curdling grinding noise that continues through startup, but once I get to my desktop screen it fades away.
I know there's a thousand threads with the same title but I can't figure out what the cause is.

One of the more common causes seems to be something with having a disk in the optical drive, I don't think this is it because I don't have an optical drive.
The other thing is loose fan bearings. While I do believe the sound is coming from or near my top exhaust fan, it spins just fine and has no dust collection when I open the case. Also, I don't hear the grinding in intensive programs when I'd think the fan would be spinning the most. It's only in startup. In addition, my Windows actually failed to boot and went to a recovery screen while booting once, during which the sound never seemed to go away (though I didn't wait to find out). If it were only a fan, I don't understand why it would actually cause my PC to go into a blue screen.

My PC is only about 2 years old and I have dusted it regularly. No major events have happened that I'd think would have caused this. The issue only started about 3 days ago. I don't think it is my hard drive either because I boot Windows thru an SSD; I don't see why it should stop working if my HDD failed.

Any help greatly appreciated