Hard drive clicking and more!

[derekaluk]

Hiya,

We have a Western Digital 80Gb hard drive which recently started making clicking sounds all of the time. It then started to refuse to boot and would not even appear in the BIOS at all. We thought it must have died on us so we swapped it out for a Maxtor 40Gb drive which we used, with no problems, for about a week until we could get a new main drive.

We then got a Seagate 80Gb drive which we installed and worked perfectly for 3 days and then started with the same problem as the Western Digital drive.

We decided to put the Seagate drive into another computer to test it and we found that it worked perfectly without a problem (and so did the Western Digital!). We have now put the Seagate back in the previous computer and it is at the moment working well again.

Has anyone any idea what may have caused the problem or how we could find out what the problem was so that we can make sure it doesn't happen again.

Thanks,

Alan

[Firelord]

Dodgy cable possibly or even the PSU under/over volting the hdd.

[derekaluk]

Hiya,

Thanks for the quick reply. We have changed the IDE cable to see if it was that but hadn't thought of the PSU maybe playing up with it.

Alan

[weebroonieuk]

most likely psu related i know its a pain but rip out the psu from the pc you tested the hardrives in and see if it cures it , also stress the system by benchmarking or sumthing to create more load
and use a software monitering program to read your voltages and check if they are fluctuating much

[Mblaster]

If you haven't got any monitoring software with your motherbaord, try SiSoft SANDRA to test you voltages while putting load on the system.

[pre]

Could be the molex connector on the driver. Some old drives used to be quite sensitive about the connector being not perfectly horizontal.