Cause for worry? Clicking on boot

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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lowteckh
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Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2008 10:06 pm
Location: USA

Cause for worry? Clicking on boot

Post by lowteckh » Fri Jul 11, 2008 11:18 pm

My 500GB Samsung clicks when I first boot it up from a cold start; when I restart it doesn't do it, only on boot. Is this normal or cause for concern?

Vicotnik
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Location: Sweden

Post by Vicotnik » Sat Jul 12, 2008 4:12 am

Sounds normal to me. HDDs often click after spinup and the disk spins up when you start the computer, but usually doesn't spin down when you do a restart.

deathspared
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Location: san jose, ca

Post by deathspared » Sat Jul 12, 2008 8:36 am

Clicking is often a sound of a failing hard drive. If this just started I would be worried. Either way, now would be a good time to make a backup just in case!

jhhoffma
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Location: Grand Rapids, MI

Post by jhhoffma » Mon Jul 14, 2008 6:31 am

deathspared wrote:Clicking is often a sound of a failing hard drive. If this just started I would be worried. Either way, now would be a good time to make a backup just in case!
Repeated clicking is the sign of a failing hard drive as the head is searching over and over again in the same sector for data that may be corrupted. This may be a head-park test when the system is powered up. If the problem does not occur during intense disk activity, I don't think you have anything to worry about. However, you may want to do a chkdsk on it and view the log file when you're done to check for any bad sectors that may have been found.

adrichardson
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Location: UK

Post by adrichardson » Mon Jul 21, 2008 3:57 am

Did it just start recently? One of my Seagates started doing something similar about a month ago. It always clicks at the same point in the boot cycle, and only during boot. If it's a repeated clicking, or does it at any other time than boot, worry! If it doesn't, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it (might be worth backing up the essentials just in case).

I ran the usual tests on mine, and it passed the lot, so I'm putting it down as 'feature' (can't figure out why it's suddenly happening though).

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