Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 9:27 am Post subject: hard drive problem
my hard drive was taken out for a few hours while the pc C drive was formatted, 2 hard drives, when it was replaced it started clicking? any know why this is and what is wrong as it will not work now.
Joined: 19 Feb 2006 Posts: 17312 Location: Perth, Western Australia (GMT+8hrs)
Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 2:46 pm Post subject:
I'm sorry to say, but a clicking hard drive usually means it's either on it's way out or it is stuffed already. I've had three that have done that and all of them stopped working completely.
Mechanically, I don't know what causes the noise. It is possible to recover the data by taking it into a data recovery centre, but that will usually cost hundreds. Another way is to get hold of an identical hard drive and transfer the platters out of yours to the other one, but I've never tried that, and I'm guessing you probably don't either. There are websites that tell you how though.
You could also do a search on the net by using a term such as "Help, my hard drive is clicking and won't work" or any variation on that theme. Someone out there may know how to remedy the problem.
Joined: 10 Jan 2005 Posts: 1046 Location: Hampshire, UK
Posted: Sun Nov 12, 2006 5:36 pm Post subject:
Most often a dead drive I'm afraid.
Without hearing the actual sound it's hard to be diagnostic, and even then it's a problem, but the most common cause of a "clicking" is the heads returining to the park position in an attempt to resync thier postion with the data tracks.
Did the drive receive a shock or knock at any point ? possibly shifting the heads position whilst powered off. Also did you apply any pressure between the top and bottom surfaces, not seen it with hard drives but this is a real clicky killer for slimline DVD units.
Data recovery houses or your standard backup (you do make backups don't you) are you best port of call.
One straw to clutch at. Sometimes you can get a clicking if the power supply in marginal. Perhaps adding a second drive has pushed your system over the edge. Have you tried returning the system to it's original single drive configuration ?
It's a good bet that someone dropped it to the floor while it was out...
Like everybody said,"it's dead"... its little soul gone to hard-drive heaven...
Three pooched HD's.. YIKES!... How did you go through that many?..
So it seems that you've got a lot of HD trouble wisdom under your belt... So maybe you can advise me in this situation...
My HD is whining a little.. Sounds a bit like a radio off-station.. and the clicks are loud enough to be irritating.. and when I bump the tower with my chair, it crashes... Can you estimate how long before it actually up and dies?..
Joined: 21 Oct 2005 Posts: 5766 Location: In UR base snifin all UR pantys
Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 7:04 pm Post subject:
cosmicB wrote:
Boingo
Three pooched HD's.. YIKES!... How did you go through that many?..
So it seems that you've got a lot of HD trouble wisdom under your belt... So maybe you can advise me in this situation...
My HD is whining a little.. Sounds a bit like a radio off-station.. and the clicks are loud enough to be irritating.. and when I bump the tower with my chair, it crashes... Can you estimate how long before it actually up and dies?..
I've seen lots of drives die (maybe a couple of dozen) in my time in IT - it happens that way sometimes. The clicking is basically the head / actuator arm smashing into either the central spindle, or hitting the spindle or dirt on the disk and being thrown to the far edge of the disk. It's a death knell and I wouldn't keep any data on the drive that you don't expect to lose.
Estimating time of death is impossible. It could survive a while, or it could be the next time you kick it.
Remember you're talking about a set of thin glass plates covered in a layer of metal which is molecules thick spinning at between 5,400rpm and 10,000rpm, read and written by a head on the end of a set of arms on the attached to an actuator. Each head sits far less than a hairs breath away from the disk surface. To be honest it's no small miracle that it stores any data at all...
While "parked" or off - a disk can theoretically withstand a fairly large shock. While running it's a very different story. A small jolt (far less than I don't know, say bumping your PC with your chair) can cause a catastrophic failure of the drive.
Just for a learning experience.. and just in-case the thing is only dirty.. I'm planning to dismantle a noisy hard drive.. and try to clean it... Can it it be done?
I'm bettin' it can't be done...
I thinking the slightest mistake, or slightest touch to the heads, will instantly destroy heads, and totally destroy the hard drive...
I've peeked into them before, out of curiosity, and to destroy ones that I wanted to permanently absolutely delete and trash in an unreadable condition, by hitting the disk itself with a hammer...
Joined: 19 Feb 2006 Posts: 17312 Location: Perth, Western Australia (GMT+8hrs)
Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2006 1:55 pm Post subject:
cosmicB wrote:
Just for a learning experience.. and just in-case the thing is only dirty.. I'm planning to dismantle a noisy hard drive.. and try to clean it... Can it it be done?
I'm bettin' it can't be done...
I thinking the slightest mistake, or slightest touch to the heads, will instantly destroy heads, and totally destroy the hard drive...
I've peeked into them before, out of curiosity, and to destroy ones that I wanted to permanently absolutely delete and trash in an unreadable condition, by hitting the disk itself with a hammer...
Apparently the military actually melt their hard drives down because then there is nothing left to recover data from at all.
I've done that with good old 3 1/2" floppy disks before.
I'm glad monosodium knew how to answer your questions before. I've only had drives break on me, I've never fixed any.
One of my hard drives just up and broke on the first boot after installing some more RAM in it. I wasn't around, so I don't know what the symptoms were. I do know I was thankful I had partitioned it because it was just the primary partition that was stuffed. We hooked the drive up as a slave to my sister's PC and copied the data from the other partitions.
I think the other couple of HDs were just old. They were in hand-me-down ex-office computers, so they were worn out. They both made whiney sounds and one made the characteristic clacking sound.
Incidentally, some brand new hard drives are just noisy. It's become less of a problem in the last couple of years though. Even just now as I was typing that last line, one of my hard drives made a weird noise, but it's normal for this particular HD to make that noise.
Confused yet? I know I am.
Yah.. Torch 'em!.. We don't want filthy little idiot snoops messin' in our privacies.. feverish to collect any dirt on us...
Thing is that I've got one of my PC's setup in the bedroom...
I like to sit at it in the middle of the night, with the room dark, at my illuminated keyboard, keying as silent as a mouse... but I can't, because it's too noisy.. this horrid whiny hard drive...
I saw lots of cheap HD's in the big city, used and new, but there's no way of knowing if they are noisy or silent till you buy the things... Do you know which makes/models run totally silent?..
Also seems that I'll need to get into this logitech marble mouse to somehow silence the switches, to make it silent too... Maybe a thick application of silicon grease in the switches will silence them..? I suppose I could inject the grease into the switches with a syringe and point.. but the grease might hold up a switch's return...
Today I'm gonna get me a sheet of one-inch Styrofoam insulation, and build a silencing box for around the tower, with blow through vent holes...
and maybe add another case fan...
Joined: 21 Oct 2005 Posts: 5766 Location: In UR base snifin all UR pantys
Posted: Sun Nov 19, 2006 6:42 pm Post subject:
I used to work for a company that worked with some sensitive information. We had someone go with a set of drives to be destroyed up to a facility in the middle of nowhere - in this normal looking factory unit they put the drives into a series of industrial grinders, each with a progressively finer grade. The hard drives come out as a fine sand. I had a small pot of it on my desk for quite a long time...
Cosmic - do not attempt to open a hard-drive that you ever intend to use again. Once you break the seal, just the natural dust in the air or the grease left by a fingerprint on a platter will be enough to collide with a head and scratch the disk surface, trashing data everywhere it goes.
If you're looking for highly effective noise dampening then I can highly recommend a passive water-cooling system. Mine includes a radiator which pumps water through a series of tubes and heat-exchangers inside your machine to cool the components of your machine you'd normally put fans onto. You can get harddisk caddies which operate on this principle and they would keep the drive cool while allowing you to almost completely seal the vibration (and therefore noise) inside.
With a passive system, the only mechanically active component is essentially a fish tank pump, so it makes practically no noise.
Only downsides are that this kind of kit isn't cheap, and you shouldn't use it for a machine that will be on 24x7... but it's a long term investment, even more so than a monitor. It took the 6 or 8 fans cooling the matched pair of opterons in my "beast" from sounding like a hovercraft to practically nothing.
"do not attempt to open a hard-drive that you ever intend to use again. Once you break the seal, just the natural dust in the air or the grease left by a fingerprint on a platter will be enough to collide with a head and scratch the disk surface, trashing data everywhere it goes."
That gave me a ridiculous over the top over-kill idea... HD's could be built with a tiny tube of silica sand or acid hidden inside the HD's case.. and when the serious user wants to destroy the HD, he simply logs in the 66-digit code, which releases the gram of sand onto the platter, then whirs it at high speed... Nothing left there, but electronic pizza...
Another idea.. Given that a hard drive can be moved about ten inches anywhere in the tower, depending on the wires lengths, and it doesn't have any cooling requirements.. maybe I could simply wrap it in an acustic sound proofing stuff.. and relocate it somewhere else..? Maybe even relocate it out of the room.. or into a seriously padded box..? O hell!.. I could relocate it in the neighbor's bedroom...
Joined: 21 Oct 2005 Posts: 5766 Location: In UR base snifin all UR pantys
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 10:05 am Post subject:
cosmicB wrote:
"do not attempt to open a hard-drive that you ever intend to use again. Once you break the seal, just the natural dust in the air or the grease left by a fingerprint on a platter will be enough to collide with a head and scratch the disk surface, trashing data everywhere it goes."
That gave me a ridiculous over the top over-kill idea... HD's could be built with a tiny tube of silica sand or acid hidden inside the HD's case.. and when the serious user wants to destroy the HD, he simply logs in the 66-digit code, which releases the gram of sand onto the platter, then whirs it at high speed... Nothing left there, but electronic pizza...
Another idea.. Given that a hard drive can be moved about ten inches anywhere in the tower, depending on the wires lengths, and it doesn't have any cooling requirements.. maybe I could simply wrap it in an acustic sound proofing stuff.. and relocate it somewhere else..? Maybe even relocate it out of the room.. or into a seriously padded box..? O hell!.. I could relocate it in the neighbor's bedroom...
I like your idea, but I don't think it would do the kind of military grade destrucion required to protect data, just enough to stop the disk from being used under normal conditions... I think there's a lot to be said for having your old harddisk ground up and in a jar on your desk
HD's can get quite hot and certainly where possible should be where air can circulate, if insulated the heat the generate would not dissipate, leading to a quicker route to failure. I don't know if you've noticed this, but many of the external hard drive boxes (like those you might use in small networks or at home) always has at least one fan in - this is to cool the HD more than the other circuitry.
Going for the ultimate silent treatment pop a couple of those networked harddisk boxes in the loft or another part of the house and replace the main HD with a decent sized CF card just to boot windows off (one or two 2gb solid state should cover it nicely for win98). CF cards are directly compatible with the IDE interface and you can get an adapter between them - combined with the water cooling, you could have a system with no moving parts at all.
So, for now, till I get the required new hardware, if I do place the HD somewhere far enough away from the tower that I can't hear it, in a blow through box with a case fan, does wire length cause any glitchy radio wave interference, like it does with various electronics?..
________________________
And slightly off-course for a moment:
I have two houses on different streets, connected by stone walkway through the backyards.. and I'm running 40-meters of dsl cable from one to the other... I hear that it should be causing interference problems, but it doesn't... Maybe it would cause troubles if I was downloading music and videos, but I've found that music and video from the Net is just a nightmare, because so much of it is intentionally buggy.. which is why I've had the sound muted on this PC for the past four years...
It's hard to trust the Internet music and video industry these days, after I learned the hard way that so much of it is dirdy... It's like to just survive, you've got to boycott most of society's money-sucking zoo these days, and just do your own little thang along your own little safe and secure little path... But that's probably nothing new... It's probably been that way since money was invented...
Joined: 21 Oct 2005 Posts: 5766 Location: In UR base snifin all UR pantys
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2006 5:41 pm Post subject:
cosmicB wrote:
So, for now, till I get the required new hardware, if I do place the HD somewhere far enough away from the tower that I can't hear it, in a blow through box with a case fan, does wire length cause any glitchy radio wave interference, like it does with various electronics?
Yes, I'd expect there to be interference in that situation, as the cables for a normal IDE bus are not shielded, so the further you get from the machine, the more likely you are to get problems.
About the DSL cable, DSL travels in most cases down far worse (and longer) runs than the one you described as it traverses the various boxes, joints and gateways to get to your door. So if you've got a good run to the joint to your cable then you're good to go. Also a stone walkway is likely to offer pretty good protection from interference.
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I think there's a lot to be said for having your old harddisk ground up and in a jar on your desk 