HD Chattering Away

[Hap]

To my ear, hard drive is gnawing on something.  Abnormal.

How do I tell what's up with it?

Thanks!

[Bizman]

Use the manufacturer's test program. Some of them are available as Windows versions, too, like Western Digital and Seagate. A large sortiment is available on the Ultimate Boot CD among other tools.

[Bino]

Windows 7?  Open Windows Task Manager, click the "Resource Monitor..." button, click on the "Disk" tab, find the process that's doing disk I/O.

Windows XP?  Open Windows Task Manager, click on the "Processes" tab, click on "View" and then "Select Columns...", select "I/O Reads" and "I/O Writes", find the process that's doing disk I/O.

[FLOTSOM]

if your actually hearing noises then the HD is physically damaged inside. time to DL everything on it that you wanna save to a new HD and toss that one out.

they are cheap enough that trying to have it fixed is just not cost effective.

[truss51]

if your actually hearing noises then the HD is physically damaged inside. time to DL everything on it that you wanna save to a new HD and toss that one out.

they are cheap enough that trying to have it fixed is just not cost effective.

+1

[gpwurzel]

To make it easier and faster than doing a full install, installing drivers etc - find an imaging program (if you don't have one), take an image of your disk, create a bootcd (imaging program should ask you to do this). Plug your new drive in, slip the cd/dvd into the drive, whatever you put your image on plugged in (if using external hd/usb pen etc), boot up from the cd, reimage the new disk, and your golden.

Wurz

[Copprhed]

HDD is trashed. If it totally fails before you back it up, SOMETIMES, not always, if you put it in the freezer overnite, you can get it to work long enuff to backup. If you're running Windows 7, most cloning programs don't do well copying the MBR, as it's changed since XP or vista. I've heard there's a version of Norton ghost that works, but haven't found it yet.....

[Getback]

Make sure it's not the fan by the hard drive assuming it boots.