HDD makes wierd noise at power on

outlawstar15a2

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Mar 25, 2010
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The HDD that houses my OS makes a weird noise upon powering on. It occurs when the drive has to spin up it sounds like it's spinning up but the sound is..... Off. Kinda like a old CD-ROM drive when the disk is spinning really fast. The sound is not continual it only happens at spin up from a power on state and for one second it does not occur when reboot is initiated.

I've already taken the liberty to back up all HDDs in the computer as I am not taking any chances also I've done a short SMART self test using Seatools and it passed all tests (It's a Seagate drive) will do a long and short test as soon as I can get Seatools for DOS also the drive does not appear to have any read/write problems and works perfectly fine afterwards.

I did check the drive in Crystal Disk Info last night and it reported a yellow caution alert for Reallocated Sector Count. However when I turned the PC on a hour ago and checked again the Sector Count had not increased. This drive would be a good two years old as that's how old the system so I wanted to know if this is something I should lose sleep over or if it can be ignored. I can RMA it as I should be under warranty but I'd really like to avoid that if possible. The HDD power on noise started in March.

The model name is ST500NM0011 if it helps.

EDIT: Just tested the Seagate drive in Seatools for DOS. It passed the long and short DST as well as the Acoustic test.
 
Backup, backup, backup. Make a backup of your current installation on an external drive, in case the HDD bites the dust you'll be covered. Continue to use the HDD until it dies.
Run a chkdsk with parameters f and r.
chkdsk x: /f/r
where x is the drive/partition in question. You'll need to reboot to allow the chkdsk.