Hard Drive Noises [Solved]

When you turn on your com­puter, the only thing you should hear is fan noises. If you are hear­ing other sounds like etch­ing, grind­ing, screech­ing, or metal on metal tap noises, your hard drive is failing.

If bad hard drive noises are left unat­tended, your com­puter will start freez­ing and giv­ing you blue screens of death, after attempt­ing to read data from a bad sec­tor of the hard drive, after deal­ing with these prob­lems for a while you will one day turn on the com­puter and receive a dreaded DOS Mes­sage like:

• “DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER”
• “Oper­at­ing Sys­tem Not Found”
• “Disk boot fail­ure — Insert sys­tem disk and press Enter”
• Invalid sys­tem disk ‚ remove disk and hit any key.

These are audi­ble sounds of hard drive fail­ure, and the prob­lem will not cor­rect itself. In rare cases, defrage­ment­ing your hard drive or cre­at­ing a new sys­tem page file will clear up etch­ing noises, but most 90% or the times erratic hard drive noises means fail­ure is fast approaching.

Is your Hard Drive Mak­ing Etch­ing Noises?

If your hard drive makes etch­ing noises when start­ing up, shut­ting down, or when doing tasks on your com­puter, this is a warn­ing that your hard drive is either fail­ing or over that it is overburdened.

1. The first thing you should do is clear the sys­tem swap file, and de-fragment your hard drive.
2. If your hard drive is still mak­ing etch­ing noises, upgrade your RAM (Read here for more info). Low RAM causes Win­dows to use your hard drive as RAM which often stressed the hard drive and causes etch­ing. When your Win­dows uses a part of your hard drive as RAM the read/write head inside your hard drive has to con­stantly write data in to sep­a­rate areas of the hard drive. One area is the per­ma­nent stor­age area, and the other is the sys­tem swap file or tem­po­rary storage.
3. If your hard drive is still mak­ing etch­ing sounds, you need to pur­chase a new hard drive. In most cases the hard drive should be capa­ble of being cloned, but you might have to backup your infor­ma­tion to an exter­nal hard drive, and restore it to your new hard drive after you rein­stall Windows.

If your Hard drive is whin­ing, grind­ing, or tin­k­ing (metal on metal taping) …

Buy a new hard drive. Cloning your hard drive at this point is a coin toss. It is worth a try, but you more than likely have sec­tions of the hard drive that is dam­aged to the point that data can­not be recov­ered from these sections.

Try to back up your impor­tant files to an exter­nal hard drive, and restore it to your new hard drive after you rein­stall Windows.

Con­stant com­puter freezes and crashes often accom­pany whin­ing, grind­ing, or tin­k­ing sounds com­ing from the hard drive, so replace your hard drive ASAP, or suf­fer with a non-functioning computer.

Why is my Hard Drive Fail­ing so Soon?

Hard dri­ves come in dif­fer­ent grades of reli­a­bil­ity and test­ing. Unfor­tu­nately the hard drive that came with your store or online bought com­puter is the low­est grade. Man­u­fac­tures accept the low­est bid for batches of hard dri­ves and then they are installed in your com­puter and die a cou­ple of days or months later.

Con­sider buy­ing an OEM drive and save some money, but I pre­fer retail hard dri­ves, because they are tested the most rigidly. I would rec­om­mend buy­ing your hard drive online at Newegg.com, or if you are in a hurry order it online at Best Buy, and pick it up locally. Best Buy’s prices and options are a tad bit higher that Newegg, but you can pick up your order imme­di­ately, instead of wait­ing for it to be shipped.
Pick­ing up the hard drive is you best bet, if you sus­pect that your hard drive is in the advanced stages of failing.

Keep in mind that hard dri­ves are com­posed of spin­ning plat­ters that rotate at 5400, 7200, 10,000, and 15,000 rota­tions per minute. They are expected to die even­tu­ally, but two years is too soon. Most hard dri­ves can last at least 5 years, if you are not doing inten­sive activ­i­ties such as watch­ing HD movies, stream­ing movies and videos, play­ing huge 3D games, etc.

Hard Drive Noises are not Inno­cent, and They do not go Away

Don’t let your hard drive die on you. Retriev­ing data from an old hard drive is expen­sive and for eco­nom­i­cal pur­poses, impos­si­ble for most peo­ple. All data can be extracted from hard dri­ves, but most are not will­ing to pay the $2000+ to make it happen.

Why Does Hard Dri­ves Fail, To Begin With?

Hard dri­ves have plat­ters that spin at 5400, 7200, 10,000, and some­times 15,000 rota­tions per minte and while the plat­ters are spin­ning, there is a ned­dle switch­ing back and forth man­ag­ing data. mul­ti­ply this by a few hours a day and mul­ti­ply that by a year, and the point be comes clear. It is amaz­ing that hard dri­ves can main­tain their accu­racy beyond a few min­utes, let alone a few years. The accu­racy of a hard drive is so minute that a micron of dust is enough to ruin it

To see how the inside of a hard drive works, watch this video.