Notebook Disk Clicking

[kerryf]

Greetings.

I am hoping someone can give me some help regarding an issue I'm having with my notebook hard disk.

I have a Compaq Presario 2800 notebook with a Toshiba 30GB hard disk. It makes a mechanical clicking sound fairly often. When it does this, the machine pauses for a moment... very annoying. I'm wondering if anyone else experienced this and has found a way to reduce the clicking. Also, it doesn't do this when running under my Linux partition, only Windows XP. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Kerry

 

[lunitic]

Back up NOW!
Clicking & other funny noises often indicate the disk to fail soon. If Linux is running from another partition on the same drive without clicks the damage may be only on the Windows partition. Yet.
Clicking noises may also occur when the drive does a thermal recalibration. Is the drive running very hot? If so, is the heat coming from the drive itself or are there some hot components near the drive? A drive which is running very hot on itself may also indicate trouble with the drive. Heat from other components is definitely not good for the drive.

 

[sparky853]

I would have to agree with lunatic. Back up your data.

I had a HDD in a laptop running WINME do the same thing... and the drive crashed and had to be replaced. Its only a matter of time before your drive totally craps out.

If I was as sexy as I was smart.....I'd still be ugly..DAMN

 

[KrazeIke]

Unless he just doesn't have very much RAM and that's the normal seeking noise.

 

[TomaHawK]

uhhm...this might sound really odd now, but errm i had this weird clicking noise too once...after days of fiddling testing and i found that (at least i think it was)
it was a faulty ICQ installation...sounds odd, i know but after i purged ICQ the clicking noises and the freezes stopped and never came back.