What this clicking noise I hear?

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J

jhkokst

Distinguished
Feb 7, 2006
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18,530
System Specs:

Intel 945 P mobo w/ Pent D 920 w/ Zalman 9500
2 gig Corsair Value ram (533 ddr2)
Seagate 250 gb 7200.8 SATA(1.5) HD
eVGA 6800 gs vid card
NEC dvdburner, Lite on cdrw
Soundblaster Live sound card (hoping to get an xtreme music soon)
XClio 450 watt PSU

Ok. Computer appears to work fine (i don't oc cpu). However occasionally i hear this distinct click come from inside my computer. Call me crazy, but it just doesn't sound normal, and is rather annoying. It sounds as if something is being "triggered" inside. Its not so frequent that that i can open my case and wait for to pinpoint the noise from a specific component. Sometimes i won't hear it for a day, and some times ill hear it twice in 5 minutes.

I feel like it happens much more frequently when im downloading stuff. Like if im downloading something thru bittorrent and websurfing all at once.

Last week i also experienced 2 system crashes about 5 days apart, not during intense stuff either (once booting up HL, once 5 minutes after quitting CS and clicking on the taskbar to see what the date was whilst surfing the web)

I read some other posts on forums and followed some advice. I ran memtest 86 and windows diagnostic. Memtest passed 12 times no errors, and i only ran windows diagnostic mem test once (it passed). So it doesn't seem to be a memory issue. I also defaulted my video card from 485/1.07 to 425/1, to see if perhaps it was an OC issue. I haven't experienced another crash yet, but then again its only been about 3 days. I also turned off onboard sound in the bios, and unchecked auto reboot on crash in windows.

I don't know if the two issues are related. I've heard about clicking harddrives, but i don't know if thats a persistent/frequent noise or an irregular one like mine. My HD doesn't making other crazy noises, everything seems normal except for this occasional click. If anyone can offer me insight about hard drive clicking/failure that'd be great.

Do fans "click" on and off? Do mobos click?

I'm probably posting this in the wrong place as well, if thats an issue let me know.
 
More likely it's the hard drive. If the clicking starts evertime you load or run a program then its the hd. Better get another one and back it up before it breaks down and loose all your file. 😀
 
Too some extent im almost gonna take this as good news. Odd as that may sound, its better to know what the problem is than not know and pay the consquences.

Anyways, my computer is new, so its not like i have alot of important documents (although there is somestuff i wouldn't mind backing up). Ill grab some DVDs and make some backups.

Should i call Seagate and tell them my HD is making noises and it might be crashing??? and see what they say? Should i run their utility first? Considering its new I know its still under warranty.
 
Make sure that it is none of your fans, then call seagate and get a new one, back all you stuff up first, nothing worse than having to recover stuff from a hdd that is broken, it is next to impossible.
 
if it is from the hd, you can tell by listening to it during write/read functions. it will get worse to the point is all it does is click and click. you might see lag during the clicks(like when loading large game maps) in the end you will get a none boot error/ nodrive.

i had this happen to me a few months back. first it was just a few clicks now and then. thought nothing of it. then it would happen more and more to the point it was clicking all the time finaly it dumped and i got the error INDEXING failure. press to continue to windows i would and it worked a few more days. it all ended when it would not boot, post would say "no hard drive found" it was dead no more clicks. the good thing well i got 2 raptors and put them in raid0. wow windows boots after post in about 3 seconds, before it was like 30 seconds. someone said " the click of death"
 
OK it crashed again today with the following message message on the blue screen:

***STOP: 0X0000007E (OXC0000005,0X8050990B,0XBAD13CB0,0XBAD139AC)

upon restart, i sent the report to windows, and they said something was caused by an improper device driver.

THe only real drivers im running are Forceware, mobo....the norm. Is this conclusive of an HD problem, or could it be something else.
 
From the symptoms it sounds like the hard drive did not read a piece of data, and lets say that data was some piece of a driver file. There is that error. try and save data you cannot replace and install a different or new hard drive!
 
the good thing well i got 2 raptors and put them in raid0. wow windows boots after post in about 3 seconds, before it was like 30 seconds. someone said " the click of death"
Click to expand...

i would highly recomend aganist doing raid 0 because if you lose one hard drive then you lose all your data. Infact with the faster raptors i would want to keep it in raid 1 because the raptors spin faster theres more of a chance for a problem.
 
OK my plan from here is this:

1) back up stuff (which thankfully isn't a whole lot, as this is a newer computer and i don't have alot of important files at the moment that i can't reinstall from another source)

2) run seagates drive diagnostic (just to see what it says), hopefully it will say something is wrong.

3) call seagate and try to get them to send me a new drive, as mine is still under warranty.
 
I agree RAID 0 is VERY risky.

In fact RAID 0 gets riskier as you add drives.

With N drives it is N times more likely to fail, so if you have 4 drives it is 4 times more likely to break.
 
ok, so its been awhile, and i still heard some more clickings but the computer didnt crash....until today, about 2 weeks from the previous.

So i ran the Seagate utilities.

The first thing i noticed is that it detected 2 drives. Well it displayed 2 drives that i could select at least. The seagate (with s/n) 250gb, and then an "unknown" bios drive 250 gb NTFS (or something like that). Don't really know whats going on there, as i only have 1 seagate drive. But for some reason i feel like the unknown drive is the one that my computer recognizes, as its formatted in NTFS etc.

Anyways, i ran a quick test and a file structure test. The quick physical test passed (ill do a more detailed one at another time). The file structure test failed with "at least one error in index" and "at least one error in metadata file". What does this mean and could it be the reason for my occasional blue screens? Thanks guys
 
Sounds like the click of death.

most likely means that you got a head smacking against the platter inside your HD.
Click to expand...

there is a reason why it's called the click of death!

back up as much as you can and get a new HD.
 
thing is...i don't hear ANY clicking during chkdisks/diagnostics...wouldnt that be an HD intensive process that would cause lots of clicking...anyways, enough with the back-up recommendations....10 posts say to do that, and like i said...i have little to back up (and ive already backed it up). What i want to know about is the file system errors and what that means.
 
whats the other type of hard drive
you have one seagate open your case up and check the other hd maker then go download that companys hd test tool and check the unknown disk.
next time you set up raid use raid 1 not 0 its a heck of a lot safer....
 
There's also been 10 posts saying it's your hard drive going bad silly.
Have you opened up your case to see if anything is hitting a fan, or kept
the side off your case while using it so when it begins to click you can
pin-point where it's coming from?

NTFS is 'New Technology File System' which is what XP uses. The clicking
is most likely the platters in the hard drive touching inside the hard drive
case itself every once in awhile. A sign it's gone bad, soon for good, if that in fact is where your clicks are coming from. A drive going bad will give you blue screen crashes from time to time, until it dies for good.
 
when you get a BSOD write the name of the error down...

Like Page_fault_in_nonpaged_area or PFN_list_corrupt or whatever the error is.

you can also write down the numbers but you probably won't need them.

After you got the name of the error then google it. You'll find out more than you ever care to know about it. That information should point you in the right direction to finding the culprit.
 
System Specs:

Seagate 250 gb 7200.8 SATA(1.5) HD

I don't know if the two issues are related. I've heard about clicking harddrives, but i don't know if thats a persistent/frequent noise or an irregular one like mine. My HD doesn't making other crazy noises, everything seems normal except for this occasional click. If anyone can offer me insight about hard drive clicking/failure that'd be great.
Click to expand...

I think your clicking is from your hard drive. I have used many Seagate 250GB SATA drives and for some reason that specific drive has some issues. I have had 4 250GB Seagate SATA (1.5Gb/s) fail. All 4 drives seemed to click before final failure.

Seagate makes some very good drives but that 250GB SATA drive is not their best 8O

How old is your drive :?: You should have a 5 year warranty. Seagate's warranty is very good and pretty fast.

Hope this helps :wink:
 
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