Computer Gurus ... Clicking Hard drive

[NYFAN]

Ok, so the other night my hard drive started clicking. I pulled it out, and my disk drive and blew on them to get any dust out. It's still clicking. One time it crashed my computer and did a memory dump or something. Any ideas as to what is causing the problem, and/or what I can do to fix it?

[Groundhog]

Your HD is about to die. Quickly backup everything you need before it's too late.

[NYFAN]

damn, that is not the answer i was hoping for... there is no way around this?

[Groundhog]

Nope. It's only a matter of time. A HD on an old PC of mine started doing this and it lasted about another 2 months before it started getting any serious errors and locking up the PC, but I'd still suggest you get cracking on backing up files ASAP.

[sterlingice]

I'll second Groundhog on this. Get backing up if you haven't been regularly. And, if you haven't regularly, here's a big angry finger wagging in your general direction, too. ;)

SI

[Marc Vaughan]

Normally the sign of a HD which is about to go down.

If you listen carefully the cause of the noise is sometimes the 'head' bouncing on the disk and its this scratching the surface which causes the FAT to corrupt ultimately.

(sorry to be the bearer of bad news)

[Poli]

I'm guessing the loud thump my ol' Gateway gives off every so often isn't a good thing, either.

Good thing that ol' machine is frozen in time in the garage.

[gottimd]

This happened to me a month or so ago on my laptop. Backup everything up immediately! I didn't do so in time, because I forgot to, and I lost important wedding/honeymoon photos (which my wife was thrilled to learn) and financial data. I had to pay $1600 to get it recovered.

Now, I have an 80 Gig backup HD that the recovery company gave me and a 300 Gig Maxtor one touch III backup drive.

[NYFAN]

thanks... i would not have expected this on a 6 year dell HD... oh well, can i just get a new HD and plug it in (obviously losing what I had on it originally)?

[MizzouRah]

Consider yourself lucky. 6 years is a godsend on a HD not going bad. Backup your data and replace the drive.

[Coffee Warlord]

No shit. 6 years for a HD is pretty damned good.

[NYFAN]

Ok... do I need to make sure I get any certain type of drive, or can i just go out and by a hard drive?

[dacman]

For a 6-yo system you almost certainly need an IDE Hard Drive.

[MizzouRah]

Since your pc is 6 years old, you will want to get an IDE HD - NOT a SATA HD. Other than that, size and brand is up to you. I like Western Digital, but like anything pc releated, everyone has a favorite.

In fact, most HD's (and I know WD does) come with a program to copy everything from your old HD to the new HD - as long as your old one still boots up into Windows. Read the directions included on how to do it.. it's quite easy.

[Poli]

Thinks back, my HD is umm, 5 years old. That's pretty tight.

[NYFAN]

is an EIDE drive what you guys are talking about?

[weegeebored]

NYFAN,

Yes, essentially ATA = IDE = EIDE = PATA. The recommendations here are just alerting you not to buy a SATA or SCSI drive as you need one for IDE/ATA controllers (which is now referred to as PATA).

One other word of caution: as your box is six years old it's quite possible that you may have a partition size limit due to the BIOS on your motherboard. It (the BIOS) may or may not be upgradeable to support large size drives, so I wouldn't just assume that you could stick a 250GB drive in there and have it work. Then again it may.

[NYFAN]

Actually what I think I'm going to do is go with a small HD, and then buy a portable drive. I also have a laptop, I do a lot of travelling, and over the next few years I anticipate possibly having to move on multiple occassions, so I feel like having a portable drive to both back things up, and make things easily transferable (from work PC to laptop to home PC) may make a lot of sense. Of course having a HD with some room for my home PC is pretty important too, so I'm guessing something like 80 GB.

[Easy Mac]

what type of portable drive? Do you have usb 2.0 or usb 1.1? external drives work on both, but on a 1.1 connection it would be near unbearable.

[NYFAN]

I believe I have a USB 2.0 is there any easy way to check for sure?

SimpleTech External Hard Drive (STI-USB235/250)
SML CCUSB235250
• 250GB 7200RPM drive
• One-click backup • 8MB buffer
• USB 2.0 connection

[Easy Mac]

given the age of the computer (6 years old) its likely to be usb 1.1. You can always get a $5 pci card for usb 2.0. The hard drive would still work, it would just be slow and it would likely get throttled.

[weegeebored]

Look in Device Manager and find the section that says Universal Serial Bus Controllers. If there is an entry that reads "Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller" or something with the word "enhanced" it means that you've got 2.0. Otherwise, it's 1.1. And with the computer being six years old it's likely to not have 2.0.

[NYFAN]

After taking a close look it's only 5 years old, but I will check. Thanks.

[sterlingice]

Whoa! A 6 year old hard drive?!? That's amazing mileage out of that thing.

SI

[NYFAN]

thanks for all of the advice guys... hopefully i'm able to transfer everything on my hard drive... i know i did some backups a while ago, hopefully it has everything i need if i can't back it up again!

[Groundhog]

I have a HD sitting in my PC at home that is close to 6 years old now, and no issues (knock on wood).

[Silver Owl]

Are you guys serious about 6 years being a long life for a hard drive? We have a 40 gig at work that is almost 13 years old and my 40 gig at home is 7 years old. :eek:

[JeeberD]

My computer is at least five years old and still going strong. I have added RAM and a second HD to it, though...

[sterlingice]

Are you guys serious about 6 years being a long life for a hard drive? We have a 40 gig at work that is almost 13 years old and my 40 gig at home is 7 years old. :eek:

Um... yeah, I'm going to have to call shenanigans on that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disks

Unless you're talking some server storage system, there's no way there's a 13 year old 40 gig hard drive. The 10 gig barrier was broken less than 10 years ago.

SI

[Silver Owl]

Um... yeah, I'm going to have to call shenanigans on that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hard_disks

Unless you're talking some server storage system, there's no way there's a 13 year old 40 gig hard drive. The 10 gig barrier was broken less than 10 years ago.

SI

I have something wrong, I know the computer is 13 years old but the hard drive is 40 MEG. not 40 GIG. :o
Sorry about that.