WTF? Clunking? Western Digital 100gig 8mb SE

[Emericana]

So here is the story. everything was running 100% fine. I got my new 1800+ in from newegg and flashed my bios. Put the cpu in etc and boot up. I get into windows 2000 (after it loads the new chipset drivers from the new bios) and then go and run prime 95 to burn in my cpu so to speak. All i am doing at the same time is surfin the internet and all of a sudden i here a CLUNK silence CLUNK silence CLUNK coming from my hardrive. I try to move my mouse and it goes at a really slow rate. WTF? so i hit the power off. I turn back on and i can not boot into windows 2000 anymore. i just reformatted it and everything appears to be running fine but i am not gonna take any chances. i am in the process of burning 15 backup cds of my two other partitions that are on this drive (that are saved THANK GOD).

So basically what in the hell happened?

Western Digital 100gig with 8mb Cache had been running flawlessly up to now
Abit KX7-333

here is what i was thinkin i had been runnin the hardrive at 184mhz (38.5mhz PCI) for 4 months non stop. When i put the new CPU in it went to 133mhz (33mhz PCI). Maybe the sudden drop messed it up?

btw i cleared cmos and everythin when i installed the new cpu.

 

[Kato]

Sorry my friend, but I think your HD is a goner. The 1800+ have nothing to do with it, that chunk-pause-chunk means something is phycially defected in your HD, and most likely its the platter(sp?).

 

[Emericana]

well the thing is it seems to be running fine now and has been for 3 hours after i reinstalled win2k i am backin everything up now hopefully it wont happen again

 

[dxiw]

you know what...my drive did just the same thing last week and since its been working fine

 

[Commander_Kang]

Well one of my seagates did that and I had to rma it a month later.

 

[OC Detective]

It sounds like an intermittent physical problem with the drive spinning on the spindle (nothing to do with possible data corruption due to the speeds you were running at) - would definitely recommend you back it up and replace it. Does WD have diagnostic facilities similar to the Seagate SMART commands?

 

[Emericana]

ok well i just did the diagnostic wd utility (runs separate of the OS off a bootable floppy) and it said my data was FINE.

well i am still backing everythin up and i am expectin the whole thin to f*** up on me sooner or later so until then i am gonna enjoy the ride and then rma it. i still got warrenty on it seein how its a 3 year warrenty and i have had this drive for 9 months.

 

[Emericana]

what i did is rather then having my hardrive installed vertically, i moved it to my 3 1/2 inch bay so it is now horizontal. hopefully that will fix the probs for good

 

[ninthebin]

well sounds like you got off light, cos clunking is the devil when it comes to harddrives...its not normally long after that you get BSODs reading "unable to read disk C:"

I dunno if this is right...but is the clunking the actuator arm violently moving side to side or something?

 

[montecarlo]

Clunking is never a good sign. Usually it happens because the drive "loses its place," and the drive firmware detects that the heads are not where they are supposed to be on the platters. The firmware then forces the actuator arm to the physical extent of its movement (the "clunk"), to reset the heads. The rationale is that once this is done, the firmware knows that the heads are in a particular physical location on the drive.

Even though things seem to have cleared up and the WD diagnostics have said that things are okay, I would be very cautious with the drive from now on -- perhaps run diagnostics every week or so. If the diagnostics ever fail, or if you start to get read errors, or if the clunking returns, exchange the drive. Usually you can get a replacement cross-shipped, so you have a relatively easy time of backing up the old drive to the replacement.

FWIW, YMMV, etc. Good luck.

 

[tragic_monkey]

i got the same cluncking problem with a wd (not se) 80gb after a while it gave me to many bsod then finally wouldn't recognize the hdd, so i went to wd site to look up my warranty status, and it appears my hard drive is stolen property and the shop i bought it from as gone out of buisness

 

[jitter]

Hey everyone,
I had the same problem with a WD 80GB HD, which was completely trashed due to the constant clunking...after that I bought a new WD 160GB HD (one would say I don't learn from my mistakes, oh well), that was 3-4 months ago.
Now the new HD is starting to clunk too...it's hell all over again. I already lost several important files, and I hardly have a chance to run *any* diagnostics, on the drive or the system.
Some people pointed out that a faulty controller could mess up my HD's, does that make sense? What do you suggest?

My system is a P4 2.5GHz on an AsusP4PE-BP, ATI Radeon 9500, 1 WD 160 GB and 1 WD 8GB (which hasn't had a problem in the 9 years I have it), Windows XP Pro and not overclocked or anything.

Any thoughts and input are certainly welcome.