Hard drive makes discouraging sounds and prevents boot

faithraven

faithraven

faithraven

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Joined
23 Jul 2006
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13
Ok so back in August 2006 I bought a 500GB Western Digital Caviar drive. Have had it running on my Asus K8V SE Deluxe motherboard for a while now.

A couple of days ago when I powered on the PC I heard the drive spinning up, make this sound that I don't really know how to describe, possibly a clicking? Then spinning down again.
Boot proceeds to the SATA controller screen where it detects and checks the array and progress is indicated by dots appearing "...", it usually takes about 3 til it proceeds with booting but since this problem it just keeps going for a few lines. While this is happening the spin-up, clicks about 3 times then spins down and repeats, over and over again.

Is the drive borked? I have tried different cables but not in a different machine yet (don't have easy access to another one with SATA atm). Is there any chance of fixing it or recovering the data? I don't have anything of tremendous personal value, mostly TV series, animé and some backed up movies, and it would take a long time to get the data back to this state again.

I have used some recovery software in the past which has been pretty successful but that relies on actually being able to boot to an OS with the drive connected :(.

Any help is greatly appreciated.
 
The symptoms certainly sound like those of a drive on its last legs. Normally my advice would be to try the WD diagnostic tools (link in the sticky) but that might be an issue here, they don't tend to work very well on drives in RAID arrays so you may have to break the array temporarily and reconfigure the drive as a single device to get the diags to recognise it. This of course may give you problems trying to reestablish the array. Even if you get the diags working all they'll do is confirm if the drive is borked, they won't fix it so it may not be worth the hassle.

Does the machine boot at all or does it just stick at the drive detection stage?
 
Just sticks at the SATA controller drive detection screen. I havn't left it for much longer than 30 seconds since I figured I could be doing more harm leaving it cycling like that.

This is the only machine that is SATA enabled that I own but I will see if I can test it in someone else's before I contact OcUK (I assume they will replace it?).
 
I had a Maxtor that failed before xmas,

like yours it started making a loud click, ckick, click sound just before spinup.


3 days later it failed to boot, I RMA'd it.


so just in case yours fails backup all those impotant files.
 
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