boot hang/hard drive noise

[khan]

ok this is a strange problem, and intermittent too...im posting from the machine in question. it is a dell dimension 8100 (i know, i know) with all the standard things and a 60 gb drive. at boot, the BIOS displays a progress bar, that fills as the bios loads...when it reaches the end, the system hangs...sometimes. other times it works fine. occasionally, the hang is accompanied by a noise...coming from the hard drive, that sounds like a click, and then two squeeks...this noise repeats on loop until i turn off the machine. when it hangs, if i leave it long enough, it will eventually go to a screen that says "error primary hard drive 0 not found"

also, it will sometimes make this noise while the computer is on and functioning. sometimes just once, sometimes multiple times...each time i cant do anything until it stops...if it stops at all, in which case i am forced to reboot. i got scared, so i bought a new HD and im backing up my files tonight, but what the hell is that noise? the hanging i can live with, cause im only using the machine a little longer, but im puzzled as heck. someone mentioned it might be a "parity check" causing that noise, something the drive does, but on loop...who knows?

[Black Hawk]

Simply a bad a hdd. Don't know why it clicks. Mine once grinded but it's still going...*knocks on wood*...

[profdlp]

Blackhawk said
Simply a bad a hdd. Don't know why it clicks. Mine once grinded but it's still going...*knocks on wood*...

Second the motion.:eek3:

I've had a dying drive click. I always assumed it was the read/write head running willy-nilly across the platter looking for the data it's trying to read. Sounds like you have sectors going bad in the area where your boot or driver load data is stored - that would explain why it hangs on startup.


Prof

[a2jfreak]

I will agree it's probably a bad HD . . . because of the sounds khan talks about.

My old p3 (and my old Athlon) used to complain about the HD not being present. Sometimes the p3 will just die (every few months) and won't reboot because of the HD not being found.

Only thing that seems to fix it is to unplug the PSU and reconnect the HD. Strange stuff. I would attribute my issues to mobo problems, either BIOS or IDE chip problems, who knows. I think Blackhawk is correct with his assessment, though, since your hard drive makes noises and mine doesn't.

Blackhawk said
Simply a bad a hdd. Don't know why it clicks. Mine once grinded but it's still going...*knocks on wood*...

[khan]

im running a disk check through windows XP tools...i'll see if it turns up anything...thankfully i just backed up all my data to a new drive