The click of death.......

[a nameless entity]

http://www.vindication.eu/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=81

The same message applies to the UT99 world as well. Just in case, and in the mean time, thanks for all the good times m8's. I've enjoyed our time together with UT99 immensely.

[Hermskii]

OR...or..you could just say the word and I'll build out and send you a Pentium IV PC.

[a nameless entity]

Thanks once again for the kind offer Herm. I will talk to my brother about what is going on, and see what he says. He's very knowledgable.

The diskchecks went ok, which leads me to believe that the media is okay, but that perhaps the read head is going bad.

The other hardware in this PC is fine. I will just need a new drive C at some point.

Certainly a new modern PC is on my wish list, but not just yet, please. And in any event I want to keep this old one going simply to have as a back up, and perhaps even a UT99 gameserver.

[Dr.Flay]

Click of death happens in 2 ways.
1) You can hear the head failing to leave the parked position due to a broken spring.
2) You can hear the head failing to locate a readable boot sector.

Almost all my equipment and drives are second-hand, but the 1 thing you can guarantee is a mechanical, magnetic, heat-sensitive device, like a hard disk will fail.

I setup every PC assuming the drive will fail.
First I partition the drive so I can allocate a dedicated area for temp files of all kinds.
The TEMP: partition becomes the most liable to fail, but is the most expendable.
Windows and most software let you change the temp folders, and I even have my email program store my mail on an external drive.

If you create your own custom windows install with a tool like nLite, you can even set your user hive and programs folder to be wherever you want.

Anyway if it is just a failure of the boot-block, it can be salvaged and you can even regenerate the bad blocks.
See my windows tweaks page for a full explanation of my partitioning practice and what it does for your drives.
http://my.opera.com/Unreal-Tournament/b ... ak-windows
There are also plenty of free recovery tools

A warning to all.
Yes all modern BIOS support SMART monitoring.
Yes all modern drives support SMART monitoring.
No all modern Operating Systems do not report the SMART data, so will not actually tell you when your drive is about to fail.
You must install something that will warn you, and let you do a full SMART check.

[a nameless entity]

Sunday May 11, 2014:

It happened again. Click, click, click, click.........

This time I had had Malware Bytes anti malware do a threat scan earlier in the day. When I came back to the PC a few hours later, it was running fine, it seemed. It made no funny noises. But for some reason and for the first time ever Malware Bytes wanted me to save a log file of the scan, and to choose where to save it. As I worked on that the PC suddenly got very slow to respond, seemed to lock up, then the clicking started. At first I thought it was the damned program trying to access drive A, but putting a floppy in there didn't stop the noise. That's when I realized what was going on with drive C.

So I did what I did last time, and after a forced shut down and then a few reboot tries, the PC booted to Windoze. This time a bubble came up in the system tray telling me that new hardware, a WD + a bunch of numbers, was found. A bit later it said that a new disk drive was found. FASCINATING! Windoze seems to think I have a new hard drive. Maybe that will smarten things up!!

I must admit that I am past caring what happens to this PC. Especially now that XP is no longer supported.

However, I have recently been crunching numbers, and it transpires that I am better off taking my government pension money even earlier than I had previously thought. So roll on September!

If this thing dies once and for all before I can save up for the new hardware, I'll let you know via one of the PC's at the library.

[Dragon]

Time for a new hard drive, boing, boing!! watch out for the broken springs lol

[a nameless entity]

I told windoze to do a disk check and to repair and recover during the process, of course.
The reboot was successful, and it went into disk check. When I came back the PC was running, and windoze was loaded and running normally.
So we live to carry on for another day.*

My brother says the type of hard drive that my PC uses is now hard to find. I don't know myself, I've never bothered to try to get one. But why go to the bother of replacing it at this point anyway? XP is no longer supported, and the PC itself does not have what it takes to be upgraded to a newer O/S. It's just too old for that.

A new one is the way to go, I think.

*Edit: Oh this is weird. I thought it was drive C that has the problem, but for some reason drive D is not being detected. I only just noticed this now. Well that's not nice. Except for UT2k4, my games are on drive D.
In fact I am sure that the problem was with drive C, because the PC didn't want to boot, and said it couldn't find drive 0. How odd.
Malware Bytes is installed on drive D. And the problem began after running it. Maybe it's a nasty that disabled drive D in order to disable Malware Bytes? More than one thing going on at a time? Hmmmm......

*Edit 2: System Restore to both May 10th and May 7th failed.

Changes made to Drive[s] D:\ after this point cannot be reversed because the drive was either excluded from system restore monitoring or was turned off or removed.

And yet device manager can see the drive and reports that it is operating normally.

So once again my PC decides to break itself late at night, in order to keep me up all night trying to fix it. Well, not this time. It's almost 1 a.m. and I am done messing with this old piece of crap for the day.

[a nameless entity]

From the library PC:

Well the last laugh is on me, I guess.

I booted up this morning and all seemed well. I had read something last night that suggested a cold reboot before trying anything else, so when it seemed I had access to drive D again I thought maybe I'd get away with coaxing a few more months or weeks out of the old heap.

But the PC would not respond. Windoze seemed to be loaded but was not entirely there.

Rebooting again caused the click of death to return, and now with both hard drives seemingly "unknown" and quite dead.

So that's that.

I never liked the idea of having only one PC anyhow, so I guess I'll save up for a cheap piece of $500 junk and make do with that until I can buy something way better much later on.

I'll be back. When I get back. Or not. The temptation to walk away from PC's once and for all is strong.

[Hermskii]

C drive and D drive could have both been part of the same drive. Are you SURE (did you see with your own eyes) that you have 2 hard drives in your computer? I'd bet money it is one drive partitioned into two logical drives.

[a nameless entity]

From the library PC:

Actually it is two separate 80 gig WD hard drives. The Dell came with one, and I bought another one later, and installed it.

Drive C:\ definitely has a physical fault with the read head. Today just for laughs I tried to boot up the old heap, and it almost finished loading Windoze. The clicking and scraping noises I heard from the drive sounded a bit ominous though. I guess it really is dead.

Hopefully drive D:\ is intact. I'd like to use it with a new PC. I've seen a type of usb drive that lets you just plug an internal hard drive into it and you can use it like a usb external drive. That would be nice.
And if I can successfully open up drive C:\ and clean it enough to get it going again, using it in the same way would be a bonus, since there's some old email and other files on there I might like to save.

I intend to look around on the web while I'm here to see what sort of PC"s are available for a few hundred bucks.

[a nameless entity]

From the old heap at home:

I was talking to my brother today, and he suggested that I try removing drive D:\ from my PC. He had the same sort of problem that I did with an old Dell of his, and it turned out it was the other drive that was causing the problems. For whatever reason a bad drive D:\ on his PC was preventing it from booting up. I mentioned that it had turned out that my drive D:\ was the "new hardware found" when the problems first started. So I opened up the PC, cleaned its interior, and after a struggle with the ribbon cable was able to remove drive D.

Suffice it to say that it worked. What an odd thing for Dells to do. I'm glad to have a home PC to use again, but sad for all of the lost data, some of which I backed up, but most of which I just never got around to burning to cds.

My brother suggests getting a PCI card that would let me run a sata drive and put that into the slot that drive D:\ occupied. I may do that or just see if I can find a Western Digital IDE drive and put that in there.


Also, if they're not too expensive, I plan to buy one of those usb drives that accept internal drives and turn them into external drives. Maybe I can get the drive working again with one of those, if I clean it or something. That would be cool, and if it went bad again, it wouldn't crash this old Dell. Of course I'd also back up all of my imp0rntant files too.

[Dr.Flay]

Unless you have one of the Dell PCs with the strange voltages on the drives, you can use any IDE drive.
If not just get a cheap PCI IDE or SATA card.
The OS you use does not really factor into it, unless you are missing drivers.
I'm just about to re-install XP on my old PC again

BTW. Windows will detect a drive as "New Hardware Found" if the capacity has been changed, you may find that it is slightly smaller than it used to be.

The boot-block on drive 2 sounds like the problem.
The solution to that it to resize the partition and exclude the bad area at the front.
Forget using the Widows diskchecker until you check the drive properly as it tends to destroy more than it saves.
Once drives/partitions have changed, you can forget about Windows restart points.
If you require the backup facility, always disable it from using any other drives.
Only ever let it manage drive C:
If Windows creates a restart point while you have an external drives connected, you will need those drives attached again to restore to any points they were there.

I advise you use some software to run the HDs own SMART checks.
A short test will show errors, but a long test can fix some.
The "Ultimate Boot CD" has all the manufacturers own diagnostics software, so you should get a copy ASAP.
It is a bootable CD, so even if the internal drives do not boot you can test them.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com

HDD Scan is a great Windows tool for checking your drives and changing settings.
http://hddscan.com
It also allows you to change the AAM setting on many drives, if the manufacturers software dose not have it.
This is a setting to make the drive quieter or faster.
Change them to be quiet.

Partition Wizard is an easy and powerful to resize your drives.
http://www.partitionwizard.com

Unless you are doing dangerous things, or have a particular reason to worry, try not do do AV scans of the whole drive very often.
Use XP as a limited user and do not use IE and java, and you can avoid over 90% of threats (according to Microsoft).

Elderly drives should be kept as defragged as possible to reduce stress, and the use of multiple drives or partitions allows you to move the temp folders and data away from Windows.
Piriform Defraggler also has a tab for showing the SMART data, so with regular use you get to keep an eye on the drive health.
https://www.piriform.com/defraggler/builds

Also make sure you disable drive indexing, or it will also never stop accessing the drives.

[a nameless entity]

I watched a few videos online about the click of death, and how to open up a hard drive. That was handy, since I didn't know about the screws that are hidden under the label. Mine had two. I also had to make a long hike to a hardware store to buy a size 8 torx screwdriver. The smallest size I had was a 10.

Since it's otherwise just a paper weight anyway, I opened up the drive and looked inside. This 80 gig Western Digital hard drive has two platters. As far as I could see, the bottom platter looked ok. The top platter was spotless, with no scratches on it. Everything was clean and dandy inside. And all parts were where they should be from what I saw in the videos. Even the little dust filter was in position and looked spotless. The read head was in the middle of the platter. I was annoyed to see that this model doesn't have a nice docking area for the head. I guess it just goes all the way out to the side. Manually turning the drive would move the head either inwards or outwards. I fiddled with that a bit, and turned the drive to put the read head out at the edge. I blew the drive down with dust off and closed it up again with my new screwdriver.

I have not yet reinstalled it in the computer. My brother has one of those USB devices that turns an IDE drive into an external drive. Perhaps I can borrow it from him. It seems impossible to find them any more, and would be a waste of money anyhow. But it would be so much easier to test the drive that way than to reinstall it into the PC.

Either way, I am guessing it's going to fail. One video suggested that sometimes the shiny read head will just stick to the shiny platter for some reason or other. That's not my problem, since the drive clicked a few times, failed once, then came back to life for three months. So I'm guessing the controller is bad. I saw a video for replacing the controller card on the bottom of the drive, but I extremely doubt if any of those are available for this old drive any longer. I'm sure I could do any necessary soldering, but where the hell would I find the part?

Perhaps I'll just put the drive back into the PC for the hell of it. If it runs, I'll back up my photos and a few other items that are important. The rest is just gaming crap, and two huge game installs of WoW and Lineage.

I'm thinking I'll buy an external hard drive for storage from now on. Unless USB sata drives are way slower than internal IDE hard drives, or an internal sata drive, I think it's the easiest solution. I haven't researched their comparative speeds yet, or if an external drive is even an acceptable medium for gaming.

[Dr.Flay]

IDE or SATA, they are both limited to the speed of your USB ports.
I do favour having external drives for data storage, and use the internal drive for system and programs.
It makes more sense to keep your music, films and photos in a portable form anyway, so definitely go that direction (I have 3 external drives, I swap between my 2 PCs).

As I say, there is no reason you cannot buy a PCI card and use newer drives.
http://www.dabs.com/products/startech-c ... html?src=3
A card like that one also has an external SATA port to make things even easier.

Whatever you do in future, I recommend you pick a SMART monitor tool to run in Windows, as even though the BIOS may have it enabled, Windows has no way to show you you drive failing.

http://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.net/home/ (This is the one I use in Linux, but it is available for most OSs)

Very small and very useful, Speedfan can even compare your drive info with others of the same model.
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Both Personal and Advanced SmartCheck, provide a nice way to see the data as graphs. Advanced version is aimed at monitoring remote PCs/Servers.
http://www.urltoy.com/asc.htm

http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm (free for personal use)

Very comprehensive disc diagnostics and testing
http://www.disk-monitor.com (worth the small price)

[a nameless entity]

Well I guess an external drive is the way to go, since my PC is so old that it does not have any PCIe slots at all. I have PCI slots only. So I could not use that adapter card anyhow.

That smart technology sounds interesting, but I get the impression that it won't help you with a bad controller wafer on your hard drive, or any other physical ailments not related to disk surface health.