My laptop is 4 years old, and this morning when I turned it on, it started making a loud clicking sound like someone was flicking the needle on the harddrive with his finger. It does it about every 2 or 3 seconds.
The computer says, “No bootable device” and says I can hit F1 to retry or F2 to setup.
My harddrive has made noises before, but never like this, and they always went away.
What should I do? Normally, I would take my computer in to someone, but I’m in Taiwan, so I’m sort of at a loss.
Luckily, about three weeks ago, I deleted everything on my harddrive and reinstalled windows, so I won’t lose anything (documents, photos, etc.) if I have to by a new harddrive.
The last time I heard that noise, I knew the drive was toast. I took it out and whacked it a couple of times with my hand, put it back in, and was quite surprised that it actually booted!
I spent ten or fifteen frantic minutes copying important stuff to a network drive and then called IT Support to have them swap it out and reimage the machine.
There are stories out there on the Net about folks putting clicking drives in ziplock baggies and then putting them in the freezer. In some cases, that buys enough time to retrieve the last valuable bits of data before complete failure.
This message means the system has lost/corrupted some of the files that Windows needs to start up. Starting the system with the original Windows system disk in the CD drive, and activating the recovery console may cure this. It did so with my system recently.
However, my system had been working fine, with no disk problems. The clicking noise from your hard disk is very worrying. I’d guess that it has failed, or is about to do so. But using the recovery console might let you get it going long enough to copy anything on it that you need to save. Having reinstalled & backed up recently you are in a far better position than most!
What you might do while in Taiwan is look for a new hard drive. I’ve heard they can be obtained quite cheaply there.
Dead - New 2.5" drive needed - They are relatively cheap these days. Make sure you don’t have some unusually thin thickness requirement (unlikely), and that the BIOS will handle the new drive size parameters if you decide to replace it a with larger drive.
Thanks for the tips guys. My girlfriend’s brother, studying computer science over here, says I can a 80gig hardrive for about $1000 taiwanese (about $30 US).