clunk

[new2]

Maybe this is a simple question: Every once in a while my hard drive goes clunk. That is the best sound to describe it. Since the machine sits on the desk, I jump out of my seat when this happens. While the machine was still under warranty (it is 2 years old), I took it back and they "tested" the HD and said it was fine.
Ideas?

This is what I supposedly bought (never really double checked)

AL440LX motherboard
PII 266 mmx
128 meg ram
Quantum 6.4 gig HD (?)I think

[pcmedic]

Your best bet is to call Quantum directly because most hard drives have a 3 year warranty from the manufacture. Tell them you want to do an advanced replacement that way you don't have to be without a hard drive.
Daniel

[jad1097]

And do this as soon as possible. I lost my drive tonight and it is only 6 or 7 monthes old. I just lost a bunch of stuff! Five or six gigs worth anyway. I cant even get to the partition I use for backup.
Also get a copy of drive image or ghost and copy that thing before you lose it.

[new2]

thanks- Will try to do the advanced thing. I have a cd writer and most of my data backed up- don't think I need everything. A reinstall would probably help get rid of the clutter.

[scotter]

go to quantums web site and check out there drive diagnastic utilitys you will probably need to run it before they do a trade anyway also check and make sure S.M.A.R.T. is turned on in your bios for the hard drive it will catch a hard drive failure early some times so you can back up before it realy dies http://www.sysopt.com/forum/smile.gif

[Ed_S]

I just did an RMA with Quantum - get the serial # of the drive & go to their site, there's a warranty status page.
Then download their diagnostics, run it & email results to their tech.

Real easy to deal with, but they had me send the drive in first, not advance exchange it!
No big deal for me, but might be for others.

[new2]

thanks, took a while to get the case off, get the serial number, run the program. Fortunately? the drive checks out. Still wonder what the clunk could be.

[Axel]

What it sounds like to me- seeing as the drive still works, is that you have an exceptionally noisy auto-park feature happening there.

Used to be that you had to tell a hard drive to park it's heads away from the disk surface when moving your CPU or risk a head crash. Now, when a drive has been idle for a certain period of time, it will park the read/write heads automatically. It will also do this every time you power down the drive normally.

So - I would expect the drive to successfully pass all the software tests with flying colors for quite some time. But - when the drive auto-parks the heads - something's a-miss with the head cradles that makes it real noisy.

This might mean the drive isn't auto-parking the heads, so, every time you physically move the hard drive, you risk a head crash which might kill the drive.

Quantum would probably just replace the drive under warranty if it's still covered as it's more expensive to pay someone to take the drive appart and determine what happened until enough of that production run failed sparking a QA ticket for Quantum manufacturing and engineering to take a look at several doing the same thing.

That's an educated guess -

Best thing - back it up and replace it.....

[new2]

Well, I checked the drive it is still under warranty. Ran the diag. and as suggested it passed. Then today, was downloading email and instead of a clunk, I started to receive a click and then a whirl type of sound out of my machine. The machine just hung and continued with the click-n-whirl. Turned it off. Took the side cover off, turned it on its side (with power off/unplugged) and made sure connections were seated. Restarted, Scandisk ran, re-ran diag (everything fine) SMART doesn't appear to be an option in the bios. Will make sure backup is current, and contact Quantum tech support I guess.
Thanks.

[gwheeler]

I still have an old Western Digital Caviar 212MB Hard Drive, which to this day works extremely well. A long time ago I experienced a similar problem, where the drive would make strange noises like it was going into power save mode, but then spin back up. Sometimes it would do this several times in a minute. I could not diagnose any problem with the drive itself, but after I moved it away from my ancient 5.25" floppy drive the problem went away. Somehow there
was electrical interference from the floppy drive that was causing the hard drive to
randomly park its heads and spin down. Therefore I suggest that you unplug the power feeds to all non-essential drives in your system and see if anything changes.

-Graham Wheeler

[new2]

thanks to all, but I fear that it is too late. Machine hung, had to power off. Came up and hung on the win98 splash screen. Had to power off and on again, got to scandisk and it hung at 13%. I have a WD drive in another machine that I am going to try. But it has 2 partitions, and is a slave. I will need to get out my reading material since I am out of my league. I am more a software support type of person, not hardware. We will see how it goes.

[Ron_C]

If you get a noise that loud that it makes you jump, you had better check around in your computer. R U sure it is the drive. If it is parking the heads that loud you are due for a crash real soon. I would back up as much and as often as I can just in case. Have you checked the fan, they have a tendency to make a clunking sound. Best of luck.