Hi, My laptop is a little over 2 years old and it has been starting to make fan noises. Is my hd going bad? Thanks for your time.
touch the hard drive, and if you feel it bumb or shake sort of when you hear the noises, then it's quite possible it's going bad
Fan noises are perfectly normal, as they are meant to keep the airflow going, and this obvisouly generates some noise. It is possible that they are "wearing" out, but I don't think they can be replaced, as laptops are very difficult to upgrade. There should be no major problem, as far as my knowledge goes.
Not really that accurate, hard drives in general usually course quite alot of vibration and noise, laptops are usually the same and its not necerssaryily a bad thing. Not at all, in a laptop all you do is disconnect power, turn the laptop off, usually remove the keyboard, remove the outter edging and change what is necersary, or you just unscrew the relative screws on the bottom of the case, remove the battery, disconnect the screen e.t.c.. By the sounds of it your hard drive is merely running out of good oil, all hard drives contain oil, obviously this can only last a certain amount of time, its nothing to bad to worry about however most likely your hard drive just needs abit of lube.. i would not suggest trying this as the only way to do this is to get a new drive, as the oil is contained within the hard drive itself. Whats coursing the noise is that of the RPM's, revolutions per minute, (the amount of times it is reading the hard drive per minute), if the hard drive is slowly running out of oil or has substantial dust gathered around it, then this could be the cause. If you can try cleaning it out and reseating it in the laptop and reconnecting the IDE cables. hope this helps - PX
I'd find out who makes the drive and download that company's diagnostic software. You should be able to put what you need on a floppy to boot off of, or use in combination with a boot disk to get you into a DOS environment. If it's going bad, you'll know.
