Baracuda Making Odd Noises

My harddrive is a Seagate Baracuda SATA 160gb 7200rpm. It has been working well until now... It no longer boots, and when I set it as slave, and start from another operating system, I cannot access the data on it. When I try to access it, it makes an odd sound. The best way to describe this is : tick, tick (pause) tick, tick, large grind. I know the easy option is to buy a replacement, I was just wondering if there was any way to fix this problem? Thanks in advance!

 

Unfortunately I am more then familiar with those noises. I am afraid the hard drive has died.

Only thing I can suggest is to boot from another hard disk and run:

Code:

chkdsk /f D:

From a command prompt. Assuming that your damaged hard drive is labelled as D:\

You could try putting the hard drive in the freezer Some of the other members on this forum know about this more then I do.

 

Sadly I cant run chkdsk as the hard-drive does not show up in windows. It does however, show up in the device properties page, and through some hard drive utilities...

 

It may need to be assigned a drive letter:

Right-click My Computer, go to Manage, Disk Properties, Disk Management. You can see all drives hooked up to the system. Right click on the drive to bring up a menu. One of these items should be 'Assign Drive Letter'.

 

You may have to 'right click' the drive and choose 'initialise' first.

If it doesn't work, try reformatting the drive from the 'Disk Management' console

 

the key is, is it seen by the BIOS, if not, check master / slave settings (if IDE)

 

ok. I think I may have fixed the problem! Here go's...

I used a program to low level format the drive before initilisation (which can be found at HDDGURU: HDD Low Level Format Tool

I then ran seatools full scan from a floppy at boot.

Next, I started windows booting from another hard-drive and my problem drive set as slave. I then went into managment, initilised the drive, assigned a letter and performed a quick format. All now seems to be working as of yet.

I also installed a cooler to reduce tempreature.

But.... The technique described above is only a temporary fix to the problem.

It turns out that the noise (thus failure) is caused by heat generated by extra friction caused by rough or dry bearings, or even a dirty stepping motor component. This causes all kinds of hell to break loose. For this reason, the freezer technique may work. It may not work if the bearings really are in bad condition. If you really want to keep hold of your hard-drive, you can either take apart your drive and clean the bearings (Extreme care reccomended) or install a high power cooling system.

Hope this helps people other than me!

 

Thanks for sharing that with us.

 

oh, and also, I found a program called HDD Regenerator quite usefull. (Download Trial Here) Its pricey, but it repairs bad sectors rather than just moves them.

Allthough, BE WARNED, it takes about a week to complete on a very bad 160gb Hard-drive.

 

maybe you have bad sectors..I made some research about fixing hard disk bad sectors an I found some softtware and helpful information at Fix bad sectors Good luck:chk: :chk: