Dell Vostro making clicking sound???

proteuspal

Hi Guys
I recently purchased a dell vostro 1520. It seems to be making this clicking sound every 5 or so seconds. It is very annoying. I have googled it and there are some messages on other forums, but as usual they tell you what to do but not HOW to fix the problem. They mentioned changing settings in BIOS...and that it has something to do with the hard drive.
If anyone has any experience of this and has resolved it please let me know how to turn this sound off!!
Many thanks

Ricky91t

I had this issue with my laptop years ago,I bought it used and it was shipped from the UK (badly packaged) when I got it,It was making a clicking noise,Which then got worse and worse and in the end the Hard drive failed!Might be your issue,Might not be though..

tricky D

Hard disk click of death sound is on this page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

proteuspal

Thanks for the quick reply Rick. Yeah I understand its Hard drive related. I hope it aint a sign of future problems...i only just got it.
If its any help to anyone there is an LED light on the front panel and its flickering in a blue colour, while the bluetooth LED is just constantly lit up.

proteuspal

Tricky i listened to that sound and that is defo not the sound I am encountering. The click I am experiencing I have heard before, quite regularly in fact. i think it is the sound you get when you click on a link to open a web page and the web page is a bit slow to load and then it makes this sound and a few seconds later the page opens.
So this sound is certainly not the Click of Death.
I hope this info is useful.

Ricky91t

proteuspal wrote: »

Thanks for the quick reply Rick. Yeah I understand its Hard drive related. I hope it aint a sign of future problems...i only just got it.
If its any help to anyone there is an LED light on the front panel and its flickering in a blue colour, while the bluetooth LED is just constantly lit up.

The blue flickering is showing you that the hard disk is in use and being accessed which makes me think It's definitely going to lead to trouble and if I were you get onto dell..They're going to ask you to do a diagnostics test which might return no issues(meaning the machine is ok!But the clicking is not a good sign)and they'll probably make it tough for you to get collected and repaired.

My best advice is don't take no for an answer,My machine failed to boot(hard drive just died) and the technician insisted I did a diagnostics test,I refused as the machine was 200 miles from me(in college,Laptop at home wouldn't be back for 5 days) and the technician repeatedly asked me to go home and do this,In the end I mentioned I bought it through a credit card and it was insured through that and I wouldn't be bothered if I had to reclaim the money and buy elsewhere*...He instantly arranged a courier for the next day :pac:


*I could be wrong but it worked,I'm sure the card I used had something like that!

paddydriver

Just back up all your data, take the drive out, get the "no boot device message" then ring dell support - get talking to the Indian support guy and no matter what he gets you to do it will seem to him like the HDD is dead and it will be agreed for replacement. Not sure if you have on site or return to base support - but by time it comes to fixing it they will just throw a new drive in it:D

If the HDD is clicking then its gonna die - not BIOS settings are gonna fix it.

Paddy

pwd

I had an external hard disc that died completely soon after making a clicking sound.
I listened to the recording on the linked wikipedia page, and that sounded nothing like the sound mine made. The sound mine made was more like you described - a web page refreshing.
So I agree that it looks like your hard disc is about to fail.