I left my computer to watch the end of a movie last night, and when I came back it had rebooted itself. I looked at the Event viewer and this is what it said:
“The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000007a (0xc03e19fc, 0xc000000e, 0xf867f558, 0x07559860). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini061103-01.dmp.”
Then I noticed a clicking sound coming from the tower, a sound I have never heard before.
I did a check disk for errors, and defragged. Those did not reveal a problem.
It will go ten-twenty minutes as usual, and then I will get the clicking noises. Once (that I have heard) the noises continued for about five seconds before stopping.
Some other weird stuff - I couldn’t burn a CD-R last night, and I’m getting weird frezzes when I try and open some programs.
I backed everything important up to my laptop, but what else can I do? Wait for it to go?
The computer is a Sony Vaio, got it in Feb. last year (so it is out of warranty), running win XP. The HD is a 80 GB (Western Digital, I think.)
Correction, it is a Maxtor 4D080H4 HD. I’m worried about this, even though I backed up all my important stuff, there might be something I missed. If it is going bad, I’d like to do something before it is too late.
Hmmm…that doesn’t really sound like hard drive clicking. Perhaps a fan inside the computer is acting up? Perhaps the freezes are being caused by an overheating processor. There aren’t many other moving parts inside the computer, obviously.
Step one should be for you to open up the case and see if you can pinpoint the source of the noise.
How did you check the disk for errors. On XP, I would open a cmd window and run something like chkdsk c: /f. If your hard drive is on multiple partitions, go ahead and run chkdsk on those partitions too (chkdsk d: /f, etc.). Maybe even do a chkdsk c: /r (a little more thorough.
I’m suspicious that it’s the hard drive because of the way the noise syncs with the drive access light a couple of times in your video. I’ve heard lots of hard drives fail, and they make lots of different noises.
It would be a phenomenal coincidence for a non-hard-disk noise to coincide with the hard disk access light, like the video shows, wouldn’t it?
I think the sound is indeed the hard disk - but as for the cause and the solution, I’ve probably got no useful suggestions. It does sound a lot like the disk is doing some sort of full-stroke seek or even a head park/unpark. There used to be viruses that would do this sort of thing; dying hard drives might do this sort of thing; and for all I know, flaky disk controllers or faulty power supplies could make that happen.
I’d run Maxtor’s PowerMax utility. It won’t fix mechanical problems, but it may give an error code which you can use to get a replacement from the manufacturer.
Well, I took the cover off and found lots of dust. I cleaned that up well, and hooked everything back up, and so far no strange noises. I need to go do some stuff for a few hours, and hopefully it will still be OK when I come back.
Thanks for the advice, I don’t know how far I can go, I might take it to a shop.
I’m with Lagged2Death - it very well could be a HD problem. When they start having problems reading sectors, they sometimes do a thermal resync (in case the platter has warmed up and expanded), which usually involves a full seek to the spindle and back.
Running a surface scan in Scandisk is ok, but the thing about modern HDD controllers is they hide bad sectors automatically, so even on known-to-be-failing disks, it’ll report everything as OK. I’ve had one sounding like a car running on a rim, and scandisk tried way too many times to get a proper read.
Try finding something to read the SMART codes off the disk. Western Digital stuff is here. Maxtor doesn’t have much. Check here.
There’s also a 30day free Win32 utility available here, and a Linux package here.
I tried that Disk Checkup thing - the numbers mean nothing to me. It said 'OK" down the line, nothing weird anyway. That I could tell (I know nothing).
The PowerMax utility sounds helpful, but the !!WARNING!! about the format stuff scared me off - the drive is still working and I’d rather get the whole thing someplace before it gets any worse, or before all my stuff is gone forever.
I’ll just try and find a good repair shop and bring it in and see what they say - anyone know a good place in the Mpls/St. Paul/Western WI area?
