Constantly and randomly clicking hard disk

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Vikas

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and *EXTREMELY* slow operation but I see NO other indication of disk going bad aka no errors that I can locate anywhere. The Dell Desktop i5 based computer is about 1.5 years i.e. out of warranty.

At first I only noticed the faint clicking noise and eventually managed to correlate it with the disk activity light. I killed all the applications but the clicking did not stop. So I rebooted the machine. It took over 20 minutes to come up and it was as slow as molasses be but still no errors. I powered it off and then booted in safe mode. Still extremely slow but I was able to connect an external USB drive and was able to copy some of the important data from that computer. It took a while though. At one time, it was giving me 20 MB/s throughput which seemed not too bad.

It was still slow after rebooting it. Then an alert popped up saying "Update was completed" and now it seems to be behaving normally but that might be just an illusion.

The restore partition is on the same disk, so now I have to scramble and find the Dell media if I end up having to restore it.

What are the built-in tools or utilities on Windows 7 which can show me disk errors or bad blocks etc?
 
The drive electronics are trying to reread multiple times to get a successful read. The electronics try 5 times before giving a failure, then Windows says "try again", back and forth they go 3 times.

The sector(s) will never be marked bad until you try to write to it, which you won't be able to do if it has data in it. The restore partition (with otherwise wiping out everything you already have) would probably cause a write to the bad block and allow the drive electronics to mark it bad.

Otherwise, get a new drive, an external docking bay, and try to migrate your OS to it with some software. Windows (last time I tried it) wouldn't migrate unless the source drive was pristine, which it isn't.
 
That's what recently happened to one of laptops HDs recently. I was just barely able to create a set of restore DVDs from the back up partition before the HD completely went kaput. I haven't gotten around to replacing the HD yet and seeing if the back up disks work.

M terminology is probably off, but when you boot up and hold down one of the F keys, I think F8, like you would to get into safe mode, there's a diagnostic option in bios that will check your HD, and also memory. I think it's called "chkdsk" or something like that, but you'll know it when you see the menu. That's how I confirmed I had a bad HD on two laptops.
 
In my experience, other than bad sectors and stuff like that, a HDD does not show any signs in diagnostic. Clicking other than at bootup is not the desired noise :P I would get the data off and get another drive.
 
Most likely due to the head couldn't find the servo marks to see how fast and where it is at and the drive would move its arm away and come back, hoping to get better reading, or it is trying to park the head on the ramp and load it back again to see if it works better.

Extremely slow is likely due to retry as state by spackard, or internally try to reallocate data to reserved sectors and mark the original sector bad. You can use any SMART tool to check the reallocate or reassign sectors count. Passmark Disk Checkup is free for personal use and is very easy to use. It should be 0 and never grow in size. If you see anything large (i.e. higher than 100) or increase once in a while (i.e. every hour it is increasing), then the drive is dying, very soon.

Backup as fast as you can now, starting from the more important data to the least important data. It is time to start the warranty call and diagnostic after backup. Chkdsk is no longer meaningful because of the internal bad sector reassign. By the time chkdsk shows anything it is too late.
 
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Install Crystal Disk Info (free). Heed the advice it provides. Back up the important stuff. Create the needed DVDs or CDs to repair or rebuild the image.

I use the Backup within Win 7 to take system images to a backup hard drive.
 
Buy a $15 USB drive kit and get a new Hard drive with free image transfer software. If your data is not too great SSD if you want it to fly.
 
Not sure why you're worried about things like bad blocks when the drive's mechanical bits are obviously failing. Don't spend drive up-time on testing it which may send it over the edge. Back up your data immediately and just replace it.
 
Originally Posted By: Bottom_Feeder
Not sure why you're worried about things like bad blocks when the drive's mechanical bits are obviously failing. Don't spend drive up-time on testing it which may send it over the edge. Back up your data immediately and just replace it.


Crystal Disk Info reads the SMART data. Thats stored in the electronics for the drive.
 
Originally Posted By: beast3300
From my experience this means failure is imminent. Back up any important data.


^THIS.
 
What do I need to do to recreate this disk drive on a new one? I would like to use bunch of my blank DVD's so that when I purchase new disk, I would be able to populate the new disk from those DVDs.

How do I handle both the OSdisk and recovery disk partition of the original drive?

When giving direction, think of your grandfather at the other end :-) No seriously, I have not had to do this stuff in decades, so my knowledge is extremely rusty and I can use all the help that you guys can give.

The system is no longer under warranty but I do wonder if I can still extend the warranty as it is only 18 months old or might be cheaper just to buy the disk from Newegg and forget about the Dell support.
 
Originally Posted By: Vikas
What do I need to do to recreate this disk drive on a new one? I would like to use bunch of my blank DVD's so that when I purchase new disk, I would be able to populate the new disk from those DVDs.

How do I handle both the OSdisk and recovery disk partition of the original drive?

When giving direction, think of your grandfather at the other end :-) No seriously, I have not had to do this stuff in decades, so my knowledge is extremely rusty and I can use all the help that you guys can give.

The system is no longer under warranty but I do wonder if I can still extend the warranty as it is only 18 months old or might be cheaper just to buy the disk from Newegg and forget about the Dell support.


Just download the Ultimate Boot CD and clone your old drive onto the new one using partition copy. It'll copy the files, resize the partition to be the size of the new drive (assuming you'll get a bigger drive) and you'll be up and running in no time. I've done this a million times.
 
Sounds like failing. The HDDs used in Dell computers are horrid. Ive gone through quite a few.
 
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