For the past week I've been hearing this clicking noises coming out of my box..sort of like a fridge coming on & off. Whenever this happens my puter locks up. I have to totally unplug & finally can get it to ro reboot again. have been able to run virus scans & so forth with no problems listed or found there. I have 3 hardrives & can't tell where the hell it's originating from. After hubby had my machine off & on about 10 times today I told him to cease as if there is a problem I want to be able to recover. As a side note...when I ran Norton it scanned OK(full scan complete)...came back and an error msg at the bottom said it could not write 2 files on my D drive. Not that this helps. I'm ready to take the puter to the nearby technician tomorrow :(.

Oops....the error message was not generated by Norton...But it was down in the Sys tray...bottom right.

Mine made the ticking noise and it was the processor - it also had trouble booting and would just shut itself off.

mine made the noise and it was the fan....without the fan cooling it, it will shut down....

I'm no hard drive expert, but clicking noises sound to me like the cooling fan rather than the HDD. Hdds are usually either silent or dead. And if a fan isn't working properly, some computers will lock up. I'd take the side off and check that the fan is working when the computer is switched on. mac

Thanks guys...sounds like a plan!!!!

Now to figure which fan..I have 2..1 for video card & 1 for puter..oh well...will still have take it to to the shop, since I can't fix.

If the fan is shutting off or your system is overheating from some other cause (Athlons, for example, tend to run hotter than Pents), your HD can become corrupted. It happened to me a few months ago. A reformat will usually put it right but prolonged, repeated overheating will eventually ruin it beyond repair.

My computer started LOUD clicking noises one nightone night, I thought it was something in the other apartment, it turned out to be my data drive. I sent it to a HD recovery place, no luck, they said it was the "worse head crash they had seen in a long while". The drive was about 2 years old, I'll never buy another Western Digital (they used to be good), and I'm paying a lot more attention to backups now. I suggest you backup anything you would hate to loose, anyway! ;-)

Clicking can definitely be a harddisk. The click can for instance be the sound of the heads resetting. Especially Hitachis/IBMs do this as they get warm. I have 3 of them, they do that occasionally, and it doesn't necessarily have to be a bad sound. But it might be! A couple of years ago a whole generation of IBM disks were doing the notorious 'click of death' - that's why IBM gave up and sold the whole HDD division to Hitachi. I had a 120 GB disk do that. I saved the data (all of it) by letting the machine get cold, then starting up and copying files as fast as possible to another disk until the noises came or the machine hanged. Then power down, wait an hour, repeat. Until all was saved. Took all day! I had the most important already backed up, but I wanted everything intact. Switching the machine off is not always a way to tell what's wrong - you need to let the machine cool off to room temperature if you want to see a change in behavior. Let it stay off for an hour. Try running it without the side panel, see if you can localise the sound. If the noise is a new one definitely, you need to take it seriously. The CPU itself is not capable of making noises, but the CPU fan can. Especially fast clicks, rattles. Occsional clicks are hardly a fan. And last but unfortunately saddest - taking it to a shop is NO guarantee for anything. The ONLY safe way to do this is to do a backup!!!!!!!!! of everything important on the disk(s) before you let anyone else near it. It doesn't matter how much work that is - if it takes you all day to backup to CD or DVD or anothr disk or PC or whatever, BACKUP!!!! Before you let an 'expert' touch it. I mean it. Those guys are in a hurry, they count the minutes. Even if they are competent. They have to. I've never been in such a situation myself (been dependant on an 'expert' that is) - after building my own machines for 15 years. That's the only way to be sure things don't go down the tubes. But the Holy Grail of computer work is - backup, backup, backup. Not only when the thing makes trouble, but regularly. I have no sympathy for people who complain about crashed disks and 'losing it all'. For goodness's sake - if it's important, have at LEAST one more copy someplace elese. It's like - you don't want more kids? Use contraceptives or become celibate. Really, really simple. Oh, and the main reason people have harddisks fail? Because they're not cooled. A PSU fan does almost nothing to cool the drives in their bays. So heat is the culprit in 9 of 10 cases. I have 2 fans mounted up front blowing directly on my cassette of 5 harddisks. They never get warmer than 40 deg C even on a warm day. Insurance, you might say. Total no. of fans in PC - 8. Makes a bit more noise, but never crashes due to HW failure. :] Fish - fixed many, many crashed machines for other people. And never did anyone of them ever have a backup :o(

These are slow clicks...2 clicks exactly....thinking back, last week, I thought I smelled somthing coming out of my machine...almost smelled like gas..but hubby didn't smell anything. Well the last back up I did was 2 weeks ago....It won't be THAT catastrophic.

Hmm.... funny smells. That's not likely to be a disk IF the smell is connected to the clicks. Funny smells tend to be one of two things: 1. A component overheating (transistor, resistor, capacitor etc) which is not nice. 2. A motor overheating (fan mostly) which is not nice but generally easily localised and replaced. The smell might not mean anything - electronics can smell pretty odd without it being bad. You probably have 4 fans in your machine: CPU, PSU (power supply), graphics card and north bridge (large circuit on motherboard). All are critical, of course.... :o) Easiest to check is PSU. Just stick your ear up against the PSU at the back. If it's blowing and making a nice humming noise, it's OK. For the other 3 you need to run the machine without panel, watch the 3 fans, and listen to them. The sound is very good info. An even, smooth sound is good. If you have decent backup you can take a slight risk and let the machine run standing on the table until it makes the noises with panel off or loose so you can whip it off quick. Be around when the noises come and try to gauge what on earth is going on. If the machine is open you can generally hear where it's coming from. Do you have any kind of guarantee for it? Useful.... lol :] Fish

I'm able to open & run proggies on my main drive...puter has yet to crash while working in Poser or Vue...It seems to crash/lock as soon as I get on the internet and another observation ..the longer the puter the more frequent the clicking. The clicking noise is a soft noise, I thought it was our mini fridge down here. Oh well had the machine unplugged & up & ready to tote to the repair shop tommorw...have now brought it back down & will re-connect and start backing up yet again....I just wish I knew what drive it was...I backup my main HD(drive C) to HD(drive d)..I then backup a few select folders yet again to another HD(driveF)..I at least try to cover my ass....seems like nothing is ever good enough eye roll

Ah! Lots of copies of everything. That's good. But if you take the box to the shop - all those drives are still in it, so you actually have no backup left.... ? :o( Soft noise..... hmm, that's odd. Very odd one, this. Harddisks tend to make metallic noises - not loud necessarily, but distinct. Could be a fan suddenly resetting and changing speed if it's speed controlled. (?) Incidentally, Poser is a SERIOUS load on a CPU. I've seen my CPU go up 12 deg C when working in Poser. So if one suspects overload/overheating on the CPU, Poser is a good way to test :o) Maybe there's a mouse living in there? Nice and warm lol! Well, all I can say right now is - best of luck with it. I have to get to bed, it's after midnight here. :] Fish

Just opened up the case & found the video card is not running....I'm assuming the darn thing should be running all the time?????? Does this mean new video card or can the fan be fixed separately??? THANK YOU for your HELP!!!!!!!

ok..the thing to listen for is 4 clicks, evenly spaced..like 'click click click click'..or even the same pattern, only more complicated. This usually indicates a seek failure on part of the surface of the drive. What that means is that it's trying to read part of the drive, and not succeeding. (the only other real trouble sound is if it sounds like a high-speed turbine, but that can go on for months..not as serious). What I'd do is make sure you back up all your data..make sure you have all your program and driver disks handy. You might try some of the disk utilities, which can mark the offending sectors bad, and then you can still use the drive. However, this is usually a sign of a drive going bad, down the road
Another thing to try is finding out the manufacturer of your drive, go to their website, and see if they have daignostics for the drive. These are usually a good way to get an error message that can be forwarded to their tech support.
the good news is that hard drives are dirt-cheap nowadays, so unless you have an older machine that can't handle >8 gig drives, it shouldn't be hard to have it replaced. Just make sure you back up the data..it never hurts to do it on a regular basis. Good luck.

dlk30341; Oh yeah, if your video card came with a GPU fan, it should be running all the time. If not, then you are overheating and pulling a crash via your AGP port. There -may- be replacement kit on the market; I know that GF4's have replacements for the fanheatsink combo, and some of the ATI's do as well. The question then is whether there was any lasting thermal damage. If the card is ATI, they tend to assume their users might tweak things, and have a little more robust thermal protection than Nvidia does. About the only way to be sure is (A) tap the fan rotor and see if it starts up. If so, your motor is either dying, or has gotten enough crud in the bearings to start killing it. Replace the fan and sink, or disable the fan and add a new one on the surface of the sink, blowing in the proper direction, and see if that solves the issue. If you still get lock ups, but not as often, then you probably have a damaged GPU, and need a new card.

Oh, dear. Renderosity's self-appointed patrol of Topic Cops are going to show up here in a minute and demand that this be moved to the OT forum. ;-) And while I'm here and typing, every time I've lost a hard drive it was preceded by clicking or clattering. Definitely get that machine to a technician or repair shop or summin, and make backups of critical data (not necessarily in that order). bonni

My hard drive at work made clicking noises just before it died. If you are using Win2k or WinXP, check your system log for hard disk error messages. I was getting "Hardisk xx has bad blocks." At home, I use 2 120GB drives in RAID 1 (mirrored) mode for my data. If one drive dies, the other still has all of my data.

We call that the click of death at work. Our school district is mostly Mac systems, with an ocasional pc just to liven up the help desk. The iMac's are more prone to it than anything. Little colored buggers get pretty hot without an internal fan. We have had a couple servers do it too, old blue an white G3's. We also call it the "Riddle" noise, after one of our other techs admitted he heared the sound comming from a server and ignored it. About two days later the drive made a loud "thauk" and siezed up. Lost everything, So far every one we've replace for this reason has been a Maxtor. We replace them with Westerns. If it is making the noise every now and then I would suggest cloning it to a new drive soon as possible. Once they start going they usually go pretty quick.

Barry is right, its actually called the "Click of death" and can occurr due to many reasons. For instance when the hardisk is trying to access a sector which is damaged, or when the ball bearings are wearing out and the HD begins to wobble. The heads then are shooting to the to the safe landing zone as a precaution. This prevents the head from scratching the surface - but not for ever. Another possibility is a defective head. The drive's logic initializes the read and write heads after the motor has reached the correct number of rotations. If they do not give the expected "READY" signal, the logic repeats this process again and again. This goes on until it receives a time-out. This constant positioning produces the "clicking" . Whatever it is - this one is gone. It happens quite often with cheap HDs - when buying one - one HD from the same manufacturer is not the same as another one from the same series, they have special specifications for use. For instance a server tested 180 gb HD might be up to 400 bucks, the same HD non tested would sell for 80 bucks or less. Sometimes cheap HDs you can buy are so called second choice, so be carefull. Mungo

To more appropriate forum.

All my HD's are Maxtor with Nvidia GEForce 4200...It's 7:39 in the AM here..waiting for 9 so I can take the darn puter to the shop :( Thanks again for all your help...this sux big time. I did do backups most of night, last night. Had the puter on for about 4 hours & heard no clicking..no crashes...I had it unplugged for about 3 hours.

In some cases, when the problem is also temperature related, as odd it might sound, you can rescue the data from such a disc when you put the HD into the freezer overnight, but dont forget to put it into a plastic bag. Dont ask me why !

Well..I'm sitting here impatiently waiting for the call from the puter tech. To make matters possibly worse..on my way to the shop some dumbass pulled out in front of me & me puter slammed into the floorboard of the car....I had it laying down in my front seat. sighs foot-tapping away

I know this is probably late but have you tried something like HDD Health, it will tell you the status of the SMART monitoring built into the hard drive, you can get it at http://www.panterasoft.com/index.html?source=hddh_shortcut and it is freeware.