whining hard drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter confidentincompetent
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confidentincompetent

My hardrive seems to have developed a horrible whinning noise. I thought it was one of the fans I replaced recently with help from you guys. I was brave enough to unplug h/d and turned on p/c briefly and no noise, fans all going ok. Replugged and noise returned. The p/c is close to 4 yrs old
Its an Athlon (tm)xp 1500+, 1.33ghz, 256 ram, 40gb h/d. Is it ok to simply replace 40 gb hardrive with a 80gb? any advice would be appreciated as to quiet running etc.
cheers. John
 
i would say it is time to get a new hd, check out ebuyer, i got one from there, also partition it.

try a search for me, and partitioning, there i got a very helpful and easy to do reply on how to parition it

and if you want to be really jammy, after that put old hd in as slave, and copy your really useful stuff from one to the other, then take old hd out
 
Cheers for that breezer. You answered the other question re copying old h/d. On that point could I simply just copy old h/d to new without having to use supplied operating sytem disk's? To be honest I haven't played with these yet! (windows xp home).
 
chances are your new hd will need formatting (as well as partitioning) xp will do that too, altough you could use it in as a slave to existing hd and format it that way.

One thing, so i am told xp does not like new hardware configurations, so you may need a new registration key (very long number) M.S. UK will quite happily give you a new one if you have a genuine edition of xp. I have, and mine went onto new hd no problems, but a mate of mine had to call MS UK
 
I had the same problem with my old 16gb WDCaviar, turns out the actual drive was lose in the bay & it was vibrating against the sides of the bay, tightened up the screws & problem solved.
 
Support for a bigger drive will also depend on the motherboard, although it's more than likely that it will be ok. If you can have a look at the motherboard and supply a model number, we should be able to tell you the maximum capacity. 80GB drives are considered small by todays standards and a larger drive will probably only cost a few pounds more, so it might be an idea to go larger. Also, if you can identify the drive manufacturer, you can download free low level diagnostic software, which will give you an indication of the drives SMART status. You will then have a better idea if you can trust it as a slave.

When you get your new drive, you might want to consider buying (acquiring!) some drive imaging software. This way, you can transfer everything from the old drive (including a working O/S) and continue seamlessly.
 
Thanks for that igor, Dammn I just screwed covers back on looking for loose screws (thanks for idea ian84). I just looked inside again does the letters GA-7dx sound like motherboard model No ? A small sticker is over this number with numbers 4.3 If thats anything?. The h/d is a maxtor7.40x-6L . 3.5 series.
The o/s is windows xp home this was pre installed , supplied with two discs which I have never played with yet Presume these are the o/s. I updated to sp2. Actually I dont have much to lose on my h/d as I have mostly whats important backed up on floppy,cd etc (my h/d usage is only 6.9 gb) Breezers last post mentiond the ID number which I have but it starts with oem. anyhow many thanks all for input. actually my dog seems to like this noise it's distracting her from fireworks
 
You could also use a software application like Acronis. I used this when upgrading from a 40 to 80GB disc running XPPro.

Inserted the new drive as slave - told Acronis I wanted to transfer the entire contents of the 40GB onto the new 80GB and make the new disc the 'Master' at the end of the process.
Away it went - 25 minutes later I did a restart, changed the jumper settings to reflect the disc changes and I had my entire 'old' disc contents fully functioning on the new one.

Painless - and Acronis can take regular snapshots of your disc for backup purposes - far better than relying on the limited system restore. To reinstall XP from scratch/Critical Updates/Software/Games etc etc can take hours after a bad crash - the whole PC can be back up and running within 15 minutes with an Acronis backup.

It's a godsend that's saved me several times.

£30 for the new version 9 [free for version 8 if you care to ask :wink: ]

Homer
 
You have a Gigabyte motherboard.

Definately use Acronis or a similar product, because you don't have a hope of using Explorer to copy the system files. xxcopy is a reliable and cheap alternative, and has an easy-peasy cloning feature.
 
Thanks for your info guys. I'm having a read up before I do anything. H/d seems to be going ok apart from noise. How long do you reckon I have before it goes phut??? Sorry for silly question. :?
 
It can be anything from a few seconds to a few years, but what's the point of waiting?
 
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