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"What to do when your hard
drive makes loud noises... "
When you get a shiny new computer (or
even an old grimy one), it's a box full of promise. Like
a blank page, it's just waiting for you to put something
interesting down. It's an invitation. It's a challenge.
And so you do. You put in pictures of family, friends, and
vacations. You put your taxes in. You put your checkbook
in. You put letters to family and friends, business and
government, and even to yourself. You put in your calendar
and your schedule. In goes your resume, your essays, your
homework. It holds your address book, your Christmas card
list, and lists of your favorite places on the Internet.
While you're putting all this information
in, you get used to the little noises the computer makes.
You hear the tapping of the keys, the quiet hum of the fan.
If you're like me, you hear the occasional curse when the
hunt-and-pecking fingers repeatedly type the wrong letters.
I have a word for it — "distypic." It's my word, but
you can use it!
But one day, you might notice that the
computer is making a different noise. It could be a rattle,
a vibration, or a hum. It could be a clicking or screeching
or grinding. Rattles usually come from some screw having
vibrated loose. If you hear a rattle, turn off the computer,
and tighten all of the screws that you can find. If you
hear a rattling or rolling around inside, then a screw may
have come off inside. Be sure you unplug then open up the
computer, then find and remove the offending screw before
you plug the computer back in or turn it on. Otherwise,
you might experience a catastrophic electrical short.
If you hear a hum or vibration that seems
to be getting louder, you might have a dusty fan. Unplug
and open up the computer, and spray out all the dust that
has accumulated. You can use an air compressor or one of
those cans of compressed air they sell at office supply
and computer stores. Pay special attention to any fans that
you find, to get all of the dust off of them. You will generally
find a fan in the back of the computer chassis, and one
on the processor on the motherboard or system board. There
might be others.
Sometimes the hum or vibration is coming
from a CD. That's not a real problem, solved by opening
the CD or DVD drive and removing the CD or DVD disk.
The problem arises when the humming or
vibration is coming from the hard disk. You'll know this
because you will have taken care of all of the other causes.
When these kinds of sounds come form the hard disk, it is
best to back up the data immediately, and it would probably
be a good time to replace the hard disk with a new one.
They do not cost very much money these days.
The bigger problem comes when you hear
a clicking, scraping, or grinding sound. These sounds indicate
that a hard disk failure is imminent. If you can back up
your data immediately, then by all means, do so. Then do
a relatively simple test to determine if the problem is
a crashed hard disk. Immediately turn off the computer.
Let the hard disk stabilize for a few minutes and open up
the computer. Then either remove the hard disk or unplug
the power from it. Then turn the computer back on. If it's
still screeching (and there's no power to the hard disk),
the problem is not the hard disk. You're in luck! Your data
may still be safe and you should have your computer diagnosed.
Once your computer problem is solved, you may reinstall
your hard disk.
But most people are not so lucky. It is
more likely that at this point, the computer has begun to
slow down, if not fail outright. When your hard disk crashes,
all your data, your pictures, your reports, your essays,
go with it.
If your computer is making a clicking
or grinding sound, especially if it has slowed down or crashed,
turn off your computer immediately. It's time for professional
data recovery help.
Why? What's going on inside there?
Inside your hard disk, there are rigid,
perfectly flat metal platters, spinning very fast. Most
modern hard disks spin at 7,200 RPM, or 120 times per second!
It creates a 75 MPH wind. This wind lifts the read/write
heads up — they're called flying heads, in fact. They
fly only about 5 microns above the surface of the platters.
That's very close! A human hair is about 100 microns.
When there is a scrape or a ding on one
of the platters, it creates a large amount of turbulence
as it spins. When the flying head hits that turbulence,
it can begin to bounce. When it bounces, it creates more
dings and scrapes and pits, and the head itself is badly
damaged. Where the scrapes or pits occur, the data is completely
wiped out, beyond recovery in those particular locations.
The longer the drive runs, the worse it gets — moment
by moment - and as the number of occurrences of damage grows,
the worse the chances that the drive will experience a catastrophic
failure.
The clicking sound comes from the read
/ write heads losing their place and trying over and over
to find calibration information. It can't find the info,
so the arms holding the heads runs into a crash stop that
keeps the heads from sliding right off the platter. It's
like when your bumper hits one of those concrete blocks
in a parking lot — over and over and over.
Can the data be recovered? Amazingly enough,
the answer is yes — sometimes. Very few data recovery
houses have the ability to do the exacting kind of work
required to recover data when the platters or heads are
damaged. But the folks at data recovery worldwide originated
this kind of recovery process two decades ago. If your crashed
hard disk can be recovered, Data Recovery Worldwide can
recover it.
Remember — humming, rattling or
vibration, check the screws and dust the fans. Clicking,
scraping or grinding — turn off the computer, and call
Data Recovery Worldwide.
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