Hard drive has started clicking and stopping booting.

Syth

Right, seems my harddrive is fscked. Turned on my PC and it started clicking after the bios's 'eyerything is connected' beep. It froze at the BIOS's splash screen. It wouldn't even start booting or loooking at the CD to see if it can boot of there. When I disconnected the harddrive's power and IDE cable, it booted fine off a CD (ah Knoppix, saved my life so often). With the power in and the IDE out, it booted off the CD but made the clicking noise again. With the power and IDE in, it froze when trying to boot.

I got my harddrive new 8 months ago, and haven't taken it out (or even unplugged) till today. My PC has been pretty immobile. About 2 weeks ago it seemed like one of my partitions was fscked and I needed to run fsck (file system check) on it. About a week ago my other partition said it needed fixing. I ran fsck on both at the time and it said it fixed the errors/copyed stuff all over the place, things seemed to work for the while. Then this.

It's a Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 160GB IDE ATA/133 8MB 7200RPM.

Is there anything I can do on this end to try to investigate, or should I just email the shop about it?

garthv

Get partition magic to run a disk check and see if there is any bad sectors. shouldnt be after only 8 months tho...
If partition magic shows up nothing just ring the shop i suppose

Capt'n Midnight

freezing is a last ditch recovery step - it won't cure the drive all it MIGHT do is allow one more boot - and even then best to try it as a slave drive as if you can copy your files you are ahead. Probably would void warrantly if any indcation you did that to the drive - if it was me (this is not a recomemdation) sealed freezer bags might keep it immaculate and don't forget to leave it in the freezer bag until it's got back to room temp otherwise you will get condenstation and the drive will probably be killed by it if not already dead. HDD's are a lot LESS reliable than they used to be.

yeah you should get at least one year - many retail drives offer two or three years (this in itself should be a clue to how bad modern drives are - you don't need to entice people with a three year cover if the bloody things worked as well as they did a decade ago when there was real competion in the HDD marked) /RANT

Civilian_Target

Syth wrote:

It's a Hitachi Deathstar T7K250 160GB IDE ATA/133 8MB 7200RPM.

Yep - this happened to my Deathstar at work last month. Used Knoppix to start the PC and it guessed the MBR of the hard disk and allowed me to copy some stuff - but after about 20 mins of backing stuff up, the hard disk packed it in for good and had to be replaced. Hope you had a good backup strategy!

Syth

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

leave it in the freezer bag until it's got back to room temp otherwise you will get condenstation and the drive will probably be killed by it if not already dead.

That does pose a bit of a practical problem. If it's in a sealed freezer bag (to stop the moiser in the freezer from getting to it), and I should leave it in the bag till it's at room tempature, then how am I supposed to plug it in so I can read from it?

MrShadow

the ole click of death on a deathstar. IBM are facing a class action for the unreliability of the deskstar. seems that hitachi havent sorted the problems out yet.

get a replacement drive under warrenty and keep nothing important on it that isnt backed up in triplicate