Noisy Hard Drive

[CDBurner]

I have a 1.5-year-old WD 5400RPM 40GB HDD. It makes a loud sharp metallic whine when it runs (louder than my very loud case fans). It also vibrates very hard (I know for sure it's the drive, not anything else in the computer). The 20GB "C" partition also fails to format when I use the format command on the Win98 boot floppy. Is my drive dying?

 

[GhostKat]

Sounds like it's give you a death rattle. Try using the Western Digital's <A HREF="http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp" target="_new">Data LifeGuard 10.0</A> software to diagnose what might be wrong and to see if it's a problem the software can fix. Oh yeah, you better make a backup.

GK

Yes, I made it past newbie w00t.

 

[CDBurner]

Thanks ghostkat, I'll try the Data LifeGuard software. I guess I'll have to copy that drive's data to another PC so that I don't lose it.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by cdburner on 04/02/03 11:46 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Javic]

Definitely back up the data IMMEDIATELY. Unfortunately your drive probably doesn't have much longer to live, especially if its making metallic grating sounds.

 

[AndrewT]

get it replaced, no clue if WD have the speedy replacement option like maxtor, but if they do then you have a new one in 2 days flat and then you use the box they send it in to you to send back the bad one.

am I making any sense? if not then I'll draw you a picture.

<b><font color=blue>Press 1 if you want to be on hold, 2 for disconnect, 3 for a representative who will put you on hold before disconnecting.</font color=blue></b>

 

[CDBurner]

I downloaded Data LifeGuard and low-level formatted it ("Write Zeroes" as the software calls it). I am now running the extended test. (AS you might have guessed, I am not posting from the machine containing this drive). I should mention I ran a similar program from Maxtor on this drive a while back (the software said it worked on all brands, not just Maxtor), and it said that something was wrong with the drive. It said that it fixed the problem, though.

 

[CDBurner]

When the extended test finished, it said that it had found and repaired problems with the drive. As I had low-level formatted it, I had to re-partition and re-format it. The partitioning worked fine, but the formatting quit part way through, just like before, leaving me with an unusuable drive. Oh, well, it's not like I wasn't planning to replace the drive anyway. I copied any data I couldn't easily restore from a CD to another computer before all of this, so I didn't lose any data. Thank you all for your comments and advice! I greatly appreciate it.