Hard drive "clunking" noises.

[Bahadir]

hi all.

I have a hard drive that i bought less than a year ago. Sometimes when I boot up to Windows, I hear this "clunk" "clunk" noises coming from the harddrive. However, no errors pop up in Windows. I ran a "chkdsk" from the command prompt and no errors were found. I ran Maxtor's diagnostic program, and all seems well.

Should I be concerned about this? I hardly use this hard drive, and whenever I do, it makes this clunking noise ONLY doing a cold boot.
If I reboot the computer, the clunking noise is not there anymore. So, its wierd

 

[Bahadir]

forgot to mention it is happening lately at cold nights, when i boot up the computer for the first time.

 

[Fruitfrenzy]

I had somethin similar happen to me a month or two back. It carried on for a few weeks then the hard drive died completely.

If I were you I would back up everything you want to keep on the drive at the next chance you get.[/i]

 

[Bahadir]

got a response back from Maxtor support. They are saying to backup immediately as well. Seems like its not going to last long

 

[Nappe1]

got a response back from Maxtor support. They are saying to backup immediately as well. Seems like its not going to last long

yep, this is correct. when Maxtor starts a keep noise, it's a sign of end of days for that drive. as said above, I also had 40GB maxtor that started to clonk and 2 weeks after that it went completely stuck.

 

[MuFu]

I just got my drive (120GB Maxtor DM9+) returned with a "no fault found" report from Scan.co.uk. Sent it in because of occasional clunking, sometimes resulting in a hard-lock (2-3 times/day), but of course they can't find a problem. I made them retest it, asking that they monitor it continuously for a few hours, and this is what they said:

As requested, installed WindowsXP Pro to the Hard Disk - installed fine - no issues. Ran HD Tach 2.7 to check Drive Transfer speed and CPU usage as well as access times, all seem fine.

What a surprise.

I paid £23.50 for handling and shipping to get it returned (giving them the benefit of the doubt, rather stupidly). I can't go directly to Maxtor becase it's an OEM unit. Fucking hell.

 

[swaaye]

I had some fun with a 120GB WD SE drive. It would crap out on large transfers and make weird sounds (yay). It would also pause the whole system at times. But it had no bad sectors.

Emailed WD, they immediately said they'd RMA it and cross ship me a new one. AWESOME support there. Hell, I got an RMA without even having to call them. It's all on their website.

Funny thing is the replacement remanufactured drive had the noisiest bearings I've ever heard. Phoned them. They immediately shipped me another new drive WITHOUT taking my credit card info and stuff. They went out on a limb. I didn't have to ship the noisy thing back, they had no way to charge me for it! (Granted they messed up sending that nasty replacement though)

I was very impressed with their promptness and concern. Makes me very comfortable to be a WD customer.

New 120GB is quiet, fast, and works.

 

[Dio]

I usually buy WD nowadays because their RMA is perfect and they're very quiet.

General rule with HD's is 'any bad noise get it out of there'.

 

[Bahadir]

I had some fun with a 120GB WD SE drive. It would crap out on large transfers and make weird sounds (yay). It would also pause the whole system at times. But it had no bad sectors.

Emailed WD, they immediately said they'd RMA it and cross ship me a new one. AWESOME support there. Hell, I got an RMA without even having to call them. It's all on their website.

Funny thing is the replacement remanufactured drive had the noisiest bearings I've ever heard. Phoned them. They immediately shipped me another new drive WITHOUT taking my credit card info and stuff. They went out on a limb. I didn't have to ship the noisy thing back, they had no way to charge me for it! (Granted they messed up sending that nasty replacement though)

I was very impressed with their promptness and concern. Makes me very comfortable to be a WD customer.

New 120GB is quiet, fast, and works.

Seems like WD was very kind! Maxtor support, on the other hand, wants me to run the diagnostic tool, and ONLY if it spits out an error code, I am only allowed to RMA it. Other than that, I have to wait for it to die i guess. :?

 

[Moloch]

I had some fun with a 120GB WD SE drive. It would crap out on large transfers and make weird sounds (yay). It would also pause the whole system at times. But it had no bad sectors.

Emailed WD, they immediately said they'd RMA it and cross ship me a new one. AWESOME support there. Hell, I got an RMA without even having to call them. It's all on their website.

Funny thing is the replacement remanufactured drive had the noisiest bearings I've ever heard. Phoned them. They immediately shipped me another new drive WITHOUT taking my credit card info and stuff. They went out on a limb. I didn't have to ship the noisy thing back, they had no way to charge me for it! (Granted they messed up sending that nasty replacement though)

I was very impressed with their promptness and concern. Makes me very comfortable to be a WD customer.

New 120GB is quiet, fast, and works.

My 80GB WD SE has doing the click of death, and during which would pause the system, and I started getting delayed writes and programs would stop working, so I backed up the whole drive on my 60GB my other pc.
When I went to check the serial and model numbers, found out it was out of warrently*duh it's oem*, stuck it back in, but I put it in a lower slot so it wasn't directly under my floppy, and it stopped making the clunking noise, but it still gave me delayed writes.
I then formatted windows for the helluvit and it was working perfectly, but drive seem a little slower.
I got a 160GB drive a few days ago and have 2 paritions it for windows and data.
I ran some atto hdd tests on the 80GB and it was only pushing 30mb's read and writes, while my 160GB was pulling 60.
So after coping all the data from the 80 to the 160, I formatted the 80 and ran some atto test and this time it was pulling almost 50MB, which is what it did when I got the drive.
But then I ran a test on my 160GB and it was a bit slower this time, which I guess is cuz it has 74GB on it?
Anyway..
Wonder why my 80GB decided it didn't want to die.

 

[PC-Engine]

Anyone have problems with a HDD not spinning up and making a screeching noise?

 

[Bahadir]

i tried starting up the computer yesterday, and the computer wouldnt boot to windows anymore. As soon as it displays the bios post, i get an error saying "ntfs.sys is corrupt or missing". Please run Windows Setup and select 'R' for repair.

Every time i try to start the computer, I get a different "xxx.sys is corrupt or missing" message.
So i decide to insert the Windows CD, expecting to see the option for Repair, instead it comes up with a message telling me some file is missing in C:\Windows and cannot continue any further. :? Great!

So, i leave it at that, and decide to insert Maxtor's "Powermax" tool to check for hard disk errors. I do a "burn-in" test, and all passes the test with flying colours.

So, i switched off the computer trying to think what i should do with the hard disk.

Today, i switched it back on and lo and behold it booted up normally

It only 'clunked' once again during start up, and after that it was fine.
I went to "My Computer" and noticed i only had 183MB left Where could all the free space have gone?

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

It only 'clunked' once again during start up, and after that it was fine.
I went to "My Computer" and noticed i only had 183MB left Where could all the free space have gone?

Drive has marked loads of blocks as bad and moved everything it could to other blocks? Sounds like your drive heads are bouncing up and down on your platters.

 

[PC-Engine]

You need to do a scandisk and repair any errors on the drive. Sometimes errors on the HDD causes windows to report wrong drive space.

 

[Bahadir]

Yep. Did that already.
Even did a chkdsk and it was fine :?