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I've had hard drives fail before, and they often clicked near the end. My laptop is a 2016 Lenovo Z51 with a magnetic HD, and it recently started making strange sounds while idle about once every two hours or so. It's closer to a loud chirp than the clicking I've heard with other drives, but I'm worried that it's the hard drive.

Things I've tried to rule out:

  • Heavy/extended hard drive seek noises (e.g. when swapping, swapoffing, or opening large directories/files): The odd sound is louder and isolated and seemingly happens even when idle, not just when I know there's I/O.
  • Isolated hard drive seek noises (e.g. with <10 terminals open or when browsing): With light I/O, I often get similar sounds, but the recent noises are much louder.
  • Speaker mute/unmute noises: Muting/unmuting the speaker on Windows (but not Linux with ALSA or Pulseaudio) produces a loud click, but it's just a mildly irritating burst of white noise and not a chirping sound.
  • Stray audio: I don't have any system sounds in my default environment, and the chirps persist even when muted.

My question is mostly one of whether I should run fsck at this point as opposed to replacing the drive (or if it's something innocuous). If it's not the hard drive, are there any particular components it's likely to be instead? Is there a relatively nondestructive way to pin down what's wrong?

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Make sure your backups are up to date. Limit use of the drive to the minimum. This implies not running filesystem checks yet. Disable spin-down for power saving until you have a replacement.

Get a replacement drive that's at least the size of the old one. Clone the disk (see next paragraph). Then run a filesystem check. Once it's done, you can resize partitions to fill entire new drive. Re-enable disk power saving if you want to use it.

You may be tempted to use faster cloning methods that skip unused sectors, but doing that before filesystem check could be unsafe. On the other hand this approach will put less stress on the (potentially) failing drive and could skip problematic drive areas. If your backups are in good condition, you could go for the fast clone and then restore missing files (if any).

Don't use the old drive for anything you aren't ready to lose. Disk platters make cool earrings and there are nice magnets inside too.

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  • Would straight dd'ing the drive in its entirety onto the replacement (or a surrogate) from a live USB work or would you recommend something more specialized/sophisticated for making the full image? Thanks for the quick reply!
    – user1246889
    Commented Dec 2, 2020 at 13:22
  • If you want to go the fast cloning route, I'd use partclone or ntfsclone. They may stop on read errors though rather than keep going. For a full sector-by-sector clone consider ddrescue, in case of problems it will continue and return to problematic locations later to try again.
    – gronostaj
    Commented Dec 2, 2020 at 13:25

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