Computerhilfen.com: help! my harddisk makes noises!

My harddrive makes weird noises since last week! Not all the time, but some times a day and now I'm a bit worried what to do? Can it bresak???

help!

Hi |

Please describe these noises more exactly!

Strange noises coming from harddisks are always to be taken seriously. Probably your drive is physically damaged, which can result in an overall failure.

Make sure to have backuped all your data. Creating an Image of your boot partition (http://www.computerhilfen.de/fachbegriffe-p-Partition.html) might be a good idea, just to save the time of reinstalling your OS.

Once you have saved all your files, you should watch your disk and see what happens. You can observe it using stuff like smartmontools. The thing is that you cannot assert guaranty claims without having an obvious failure.

HTH

cheers 8)
JoSsiF

@Jossif: Do you have any tips for hdd check-programs?

@brit: instead of making a complete image (might be a space problem), you should at least save / backup (http://www.computerhilfen.de/fachbegriffe-b-Backup.html) your important data, pictures, documents etc. Everything you don't want to loose and that fits on CD-R/DVD-R...

As mentioned, smartmontools should be a good choice. However, this tool requires some technical knowledge or at least reading docs in order to be able to interprete the output data of the program.

Furthermore, the vendor of the harddisk (http://www.computerhilfen.de/fachbegriffe-h-Harddisk.html) should provide a tool for harddrive checks.

Be aware of the fact that none of these programs is able to detect any malfunction of the device. Some noises of harddisks are caused by physical elements like a defective spindle motor, which is hard to detect by software.

cheers 8)
JoSsiF