Click of Death

[I.M.O.G.]

We've almost all heard it - the infamous "Click of Death". But where does this sound eminate from?

For those of you who don't know it by name, here are the symptoms:

System hangs, an audible "click, pause, click" which has a consistent rythm, and it always ends in death.

I had earlier thought that this were head crashes and you could hear the head dinging off the platter, or it was the arm dinging against the HDD casing... But I would expect that if this were the case, a HDD couldn't last for an extended amount of time.

This has been happening intermittently more than a half dozen times a day on a users thinkpad I've been working with and its been ongoing for more than a week and a half.

I'm beginning to think this is not the sound of a head crash at all - head crashes must be far too catastrophic for the read/write heads and sensitive platters... Especially after I am able to image the entire drive up to a server, and then I perform an IBM drive fitness utility test and the drive passes fine.

So where does this "click of death" sound come from?

 

[KILLorBE]

The heads don't touch the platter(s), and even if they did they couldn't possibly make such a loud noise.

Most likely it's the arm moving rapidly to its "park" position when the HDD looses control over the arm, there are some very strong magnets to keep the arm in place when the HDD is off, so the arm will be pulled back with quite a bit of force.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Erm, I know the heads don't touch the platter normally - but that is what happens when there is a head crash - the read/write heads drop into the platter and typically the head gets damaged.

So you don't think a head crash could make a loud clicking noise like that? I didn't really think so either.

The thought on the arm sounds about right - it sounds like it could be the arm smacking the casing or somethign inside there. Interesting thought... Anyone else have ideas? Or good linkage?

BTW, after the windows loading screen comes up with the progress bar, the user's system is blue screening with an Inaccessible boot device message. Putting a new HDD on order.

I have found a lot of information, but nothing very good on the click of death.

 

[SavageBasher]

I would think a head crash, if audible, would sound like shiiiing... or another type of scraping noise.

On the noise note though, my seagate has been getting louder ever since I got it. This could also be because I have 256 megs of ram, and have over 30 gigs on this 40 gig hard drive filled...

 

[urbancontra]

have you tried taking the hd out of the notebook and running it as a slave off a desktop?, then running diagnostics on it?

 

[stool]

Most of the information that I had read on the Click of Death had to do with mainly Zip drives. Got to admit, this is the first I've seen it mentioned in connection with hard drives.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Hmph, the click of death in reference to PC Hard drives is all over the net though too... I hadn't ever seen it mentioned in reference to zip drives actually. That's funny.

Anyways, as for this disk, I received a new HDD from IBM today, but won't be able to pull the clicking disk until the user comes back into town. Once he arrives, I won't be running any diagnostics as I will just be shipping the drive back - its under warranty, and is obviously failing.

If it were mine, and it was on my own time instead of at work... I would definetly do some more troubleshooting and hook it up to my desktop. I bought a converter a year or two ago for this purpose when working on a friends system.

 

[hkgonra]

I just got a raptor Friday got it up and running and when I got back today and turned my pc on all I heard was a loud tapping sound , and then the bios of primary sata drive not found. I guess I got a quick dose of the click of death.