noisy hdd = worried owner ((Fixed))

[Fraggle]

Hey everyone.                I HAVE VISTA! (I'm so sorry!)
   Over the last month or so, I have noticed a buzzing noise coming from my tower. I believe it is the primary hard disk spinning as the noise does not occur when the hdd is not being accessed (as shown by the led on the front)

Quite apart from the constant irritation of the noise, I am now concerned as to the continued good health of my drive.

Is it time to buy a new drive and make an image of my primary drive? I have many photos of my children which I do not want to lose, not to mention a few gigabytes of music and video which will be laborious to replace. (I hate copying cds over to the computer). (plus I don't really want to have to purchase a new copy of windows at several hundred pounds...)

Also, am I right in thinking you can image your primary, swap disks and carry on as normal? will the operating system still work?

ARGH!

Kind regards,
Fraggle

[carl]

i got a noisy HDD it makes like a buzzing noise and sometimes a screeching noise.  to fix this all i did was give my computer a hit on the side and all fixed. 

[Ediseye]

Ok, let's get right to it.

DO NOT HIT YOUR COMPUTER AS CARL DOES

This could cause the head on the hard drive to come in contact with the magnetic disk, causing even more damage that can't be reversed.

As far as the clicking or buzzing sound goes, it could be a couple things. The hard drive could be going on the downward slope, like I've seen in the past, or it could just be a buzzing. I've got a 2002 Western Digital drive here that buzzes non-stop. I actually use it s a backup along with a external drive as well. But I also used to have a 2004 Western Digital drive that made a clicking noise for a couple days, and crashed on me while playing CoD2 the next day. Lost everything. So, it could be either.

Are you guaranteed that its the hard drive? If its just buzzing, it could be your graphics card (Newer NVIDIA cards sometime have this problem) or it could be you power supply unit (PSU) which sometimes buzzes due to the coils touching each other. [Though these aren't all too common. It is probably your hard drive]

If it is in fact your hard drive, I would personally make a backup of all the contents such as your pictures, movies, documents, etc. onto another drive for the time being; just to be safe.

Also, I'd run a Scan disk to repair any bad sectors that may be currently on the drive. Make sure that you select BOTH boxes in the Check disk window.When it asks to do it on the next restart, say yes. Restart your computer and let it run. It may take some time. (You can get to checkdsk by going to START --> MY COMPUTER --> RIGHT CLICK ON YOUR PRIMARY DRIVE --> PROPERTIES --> TOOLS TAB --> ERROR-CHECKING)

[Fraggle]

ok Ediseye, some more specific info......

the buzzing sounds more like a vibrating noise and it's not constant. an analogy would be the sound a brake pad makes on a buckled cycle wheel. it rubs then stops rubbing as the wheel rotates. likewise, the noise will occur in a similar rotary pattern. also it sounds more like a spinning disk working hard ( a sound i haven't heard since my old 486 home computer. lol. pre-cdrom, pre-pentium, pre-historic  )
what a difference 11 years makes eh?

anyway, thx ed. I'll assume the drive is going the same way as our economy and invest in a new one. I'll also run the scandisk utility.

Do I have the right idea about backing up the whole disk, operating system included? will it work?

Thx again,
Fraggle

[carl]

Ok, let's get right to it. 

DO NOT HIT YOUR COMPUTER AS CARL DOES

hahahahahah.  LOL

on a more serious note, Ediseye is right.  your hard drive may be going down hill.  it my old computer it would make a grinding noise like rubbing two stones together.  it eventual started saying you don't have any hard drive space left.  i would do the disk check. 

[Ediseye]

I'd go ahead and backup then. Not take any chances if it actually sounds like a rotary, where it only happens every other spot.

Also, backing up the whole operating system, as far as I know, would not work. You would need to backup your important files, such as My Documents and such. Then on the new hard drive, reinstall Windows, update it and what not, and put your files back on. I don't think a backup of the "WINDOWS" folder would work. Never tried it though, so I'm not completely sure.

[Filla]

Did you clean out the Fans, maybe to much dust is over heating it.

[Fraggle]

Yeah, I cleaned all the dust out a coupla weeks ago, just after it started being noisy.

Re-installing windows will be an expensive task methinks. Computers here are not supplied with windows disks for fear of piracy. so the only option I have if my primary fails is to purchase a new license at approximately £120.

I've found a 500gb sata drive for £20 so what I really need to know now is, will there be any way of 'cloning' my primary drive onto the larger new drive and then being able to run windows from the clone.

I can find out as soon as I get the drive but I need to know if there is a utility which can be downloaded for this task.

Thanks for all the helpful answers so far, you've all been great!

Fraggle

[Ediseye]

I've searched a bit more into the matter, as I have never copied a Windows operating system over to another drive, and it seems like it is possible.

One software package that I found is Acronis True Image. It seems like it can do a exact backup of everything on the drive, even the operating system. You would probably need to remove the password on Windows to make sure everything works out, but again, I haven't used this program, so I'm not completely sure.

Maybe someone else has worked with True Image?

[BFM_Kiwi]

I've used Acronis at work, it's very good. 

As for the hard drive, if it's just vibrating, then open the case, turn on the computer and see if you can dampen the vibration with something.  I've stuck bits of cardboard to stop that sort of thing.

Also make sure it's not the CD drive, those make a lot of vibration noise.

It very well may be going downhill, but I had a noisy drive that I "fixed" by just dampening the vibration and it worked for a year or so until I got rid of the comp.

[MrMxyzptlk]

If your hard drive is more than three years old you should probably replace it anyway, even if it's NOT the hard drive making the sound! 

And you're not going to "back up" your drive to another, new one, you're going to "image" it.

"Imaging" makes a complete, exact copy of the disk as-is.

Acronis True Image is, indeed one tool to do this. I don't know much about that particular product - aside from the fact that it WILL do the job nicely, as I use Partition Magic or Ghost for imaging disks. (Which I do A LOT, and as my preferred method of doing "full" backups, BTW....)

One thing to note about "cloning" your (sole) hard drive onto a new one when running Windows: It is best to do it AT LEAST SIX MONTHS AFTER ANY OTHER HARDWARE MODIFICATIONS TO YOUR SYSTEM.

Why?!?

Because Windoze keeps tabs on what hardware changes on your system and when, and if too much changes it will flag your system as another, totally different system and assume that you're "stealing" a copy of WIndows by putting it on a different computer.    If a certain number of changes to the hardware it tracks happen within the same six months, it flags it for reactivation.  NBD, but a pain, nonetheless.

I'm absolutely, positively sure that Windoze ALWAYS tracks your "C" partition's hard drive details WRT this, so when you "clone & swap" your hard drive it MIGHT say "Your hardware has changed" and simply ask you to reactivate on line.

But if you've changed too much stuff it will ask you to call them by phone in order to reactivate your OS.... (Again, NBD, just making you feel like a theif for doing something useful... to something that YOU OWN OUTRIGHT, is all....)

So purchase any of the three-mentioned programs to "image" your hard drive onto your new hard drive after you've: 1) Run Scandisk on all your exiting partitions, 2) Run Defrag on all your partitions AT LEAST THREE TIMES ON EACH (compact data makes the imaging go faster, you see....), and 3) followed the instructions for your imaging software to connect up the devices for imaging.

FYI: I recommend Partition Magic (PM) to do this for One Big Reason: Once you've successfully moved everything over to the new, probably LARGER hard drive, you can use the partitioning tools to resize/adjust your EXISTING partitions as needed.  PM is an excellent tool for managing your disk space/partitioning easily and reliably. Most other tools do not have partition-level management tools, only "total disk" stuff....

[Tåndêm]

Is the HD sitting DIRECTLY (i.e. in the drive bay RIGHT THERE ABOVE) another one? I did that once and it ground very noisily. If that's the case, try moving it up a drive bay.

[Fraggle]

Hi guys, Merry xmas and thx again for all your replies.

Firstly, Kiwi, It's definitely the hdd. there is rarely a disc in my cd/dvd rom drive and the noise occurs whenever the primary drive is accessed (like when the wife is watching telly whilst i'm on halo  ) and Tandem, There is already a drive bay separating my two drives. thanks for the suggestions though. I think I'll go ahead with a newer drive. I have space issues anyway so it's more beneficial in the long run.

Is it time to buy a new drive and make an image of my primary drive?

Mxy, I thought I had the right idea but got the terms mixed up. It's always good to get confirmation/clarification though. Image the disk and then swap it over. sweet.
Thanks for the useful suggestions too. I would have never realised that cleaning up and de-fraggle-ing  the drive to be imaged is necessary (even though reading it on the post, it makes perfect sense). I am off to the beloved january sales early tomorrow morning to acquire my new drive and then I will commence the operation. I'm not due at work for another 2 days so there should be no interruptions.

Fortunately I have made no harware changes for about a year so no problems there either.

I do have another drive installed but it is older, slower and also full up. also, the primary is a sata drive and the secondary is an ide drive tagged onto the dvdrom's ide cable. It's purely excess storage for the many episodes of various tv series i download to watch after work. I presume this will not present any surprises for me?

In any case, Thank you all. It looks to be a happy xmas for me after all.

[MrMxyzptlk]

That all looks and sounds good, Fraggle, but just an FYI: When you put an HDD device on the same IDE CABLE(/channel) as a CD/DVD drive device THE HDD CAN ONLY BE ACCESSED AT THE CD/DVD DRIVE'S FASTEST SPEED!

Not that this really matters for your set up: You're not doing intensive accesses to that channel's HDD, but I try to avoid mixing HDD devices with non-HDD device ON THE SAME IDE CHANNEL/CABLE whenever I can. Even if it means running another IDE cable to and using the second IDE channel on my mobo to do that.

NBD, just FYI!

[Fraggle]

lol. thx for the info. i was wondering why it was a bit slower than the primary. Like you say though, it's NBD. It's just long-term storage for rubbish that I don't need on a daily basis. Basically, I ripped the primary out of the old pc, hooked it up to the new one, copied over my crap, formatted it then copied the stuff back over. Total space used, about 50%. (it's full up now tho. haha)

Although I defrag regularly as a rule, It's difficult on a nearly-full drive so I'm going to keep about 8% of the new one free when it's in. I'll probably look at getting a new secondary of the same size in a couple of months too. that'll be a sata as well so all-in-all, I think that'll set me up for a coupla years.

Thx dude
Fraggle