Hello people!
Rauchster here with another stumper of a question.

Got a PC in today, and they complained that during boot-up, they got a system file is missing or corrupted error.
Turned on the computer, and Everything seems fine until the hard drive spins up.
It starts off for about 15 seconds as fine, until BIOS is done and it's trying to load up.
Spins up, and then you hear not quite clicks, but more like the hard drive needle is skipping over a bunch of grooves really quickly.
It sounds kind of like this ( * = sound, - = no sound)
******---*****---*****---*****-------**-------**-----------******---*****---*****---*****-------**-------**-----------
And repeat that over again.
Four long, and then two short grinds (for lack of a better term)
It does this about 10-12 times, and then spins down, and the missing or corrupted file error appears.

So.... most of you are now thinking that the hard drive is failing right?
Wrong.
Because that's exactly what my first thought was.
But, just to test it, I stuck it in an external HDD reader.
Works just fine on 3 different computers, and Chkdsk comes back clean with no corrupted or bad sectors.
So I put a new HDD in this computer. One that worked fine in another computer. Same thing happens - Does same pattern of grinds, and then stops.

Here's what I've tried:
Tested both old and new HDD's, all work in other computers, and all are scanned as clean.
Tried new PSU (in case HDD wasn't getting enough power to spin) One new PSU short circuited... (Thank god for RMA) and another one had the same results as the original.
Tried new IDE Cable (Yes these are older computers), same results.
Tried new IDE cable slot, same resutls.
Unplugged all peripherals, except Mobo and CPU Fan and HDD, still grinds.
Booting off Windows XP CD just comes up with HDD not found error. (Put that HDD in new computer with same CD, and it starts fine)

My only guess left is a bad IDE Controller on the mobo, but there is no real way to confirm that.

Anyone able to help?

I would figure that one out, sounds like a short somewhere?

I had a bad cpu fan one time that caused the same problem.

Greetings Rauchster:

Definetly a odd one.

First thought is that you are getting what is called Seek noise. Activator arm is clicking hard against the stops so to speak.

There was some acoustic management software called AMSET by Maxtor if I recall to change the noise level coming from drives.

Other thought is that you are not getting the noise from the drive but some sort of electrical impulse/signal you are hearing coming from a speaker mounted on the motherboard. Something I want to call EMI, or even a singing capacitor.

Regards

Kaz

kazzoo,

I have a few thoughts about this as I too have had "noisy: hard drives:

1) The drive is NOT defective, but simply noisy - in which case I would just live with it.

2) The drive has bad sectors and it's clicking because it's having to re-read those questionable sectors. In this case, I would boot up into the XP Recovery Console and run a CHKDSK C: /R. If the drive has too many bad sectors, you may want to consider downloading and running the drive mfg's Low-Leve format utility and if THAT doesn't help - you basically need to replace the drive

3) Your drive is either seriously fragmented or has a physically misplaced NTFS MFT table. Serious fragmentation will cause the drives heads to have to constantly seek - resulting in a constant "clicking" noise. The MFT table issue can be caused by restoring the OS from a disk imaging program such as Ghost. If the MFT table is messed up, you should probably consider installing XP from scratch rather than via a Ghost or other imaging program. If you drive is fragmented - you can run a Defrag.

These are issues that I've found to cause noisy, clicking hard drives.

Hope this helps.

- John