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My homebuilt 2007 Intel Pentium E2180 system is having serious hard drive problems . This is the story ......

So , today , I opened my computer because one of the HDD's installed was not getting detected . I cleaned out the SATA port , and changed its port and started .

To my absolute horror and disbelief , no Hard drive was showing up (I had three at the time - an old WD 160GB SATA , a really old IDE seagate barracude ,and a Seagate SATA Laptop Drive (my boot drive) . )

All that showed up was , after 

Memory Runs at Single Channel

was 

IDE Channel 1 Master : None

and so on . So I entered the bios and also saw nothing there .

I then disassembled the PC and tried removing the drive I had just connected . But no dice ! But wait ! I see something !

The PC detected my old IDE drive , and got me to a 'grub rescue' prompt . I shut down again , and tried to connect the wires to a DVD , which is also detected .

And this brings me to the second problem . At startup , I hear a 'click' from the PC , as if the HDD is failing . Could that be true ?

Can anybody help me diagnose this problem ?

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  • Clicking of a HDD could mean its broken but it could mean you just need to Unplug it boot it up and plug it back in and see if it get detected. If it continues to click like you say it could be broken. But try a different power connector also. I had a drive give the symptoms before when it was brand new and it was the connector.
    – NetworkKingPin
    Commented Apr 11, 2016 at 11:42
  • @NetworkKingPin I don't understand . Are you saying I should hot-plug the HDD ?
    – spark
    Commented Apr 11, 2016 at 11:45
  • No, Im saying try another power connection to the hardrive it sounds like it may not be getting good power
    – NetworkKingPin
    Commented Apr 11, 2016 at 11:46
  • @NetworkKingPin - will try !
    – spark
    Commented Apr 11, 2016 at 11:48
  • 1
    are they backed up? This really feels like a pre-failure state and replacing the drives dosen't sound like a bad idea
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Apr 11, 2016 at 12:12

1 Answer 1

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For what it's worth, any hard disk drive that starting making a "clicking" sound died sometime soon afterwards. This includes hard disk drives that showed no problems with smartctl, any other diagnostic run in the BIOS and no negative entries in the log files.

Run the full range of BIOS diagnostic tests to see if there is some other problem perhaps with the motherboard, controller or memory. It could be hardware issue elsewhere and not the drives at all.

One way to trouble-shoot a "clicking" hard drive, is to put it in another system. Or put it in an enclosure and run it off of eSATA or USB, to see if the problem goes away or can be replicated. If the problem exists elsewhere, then considering other factors it would be reasonable to assume the hard disk drive needs to be replaced.

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  • smartctl 'passed it' when I ran SMART on it a few days ago . And it was working a few minutes ago , while I was in Linux .
    – spark
    Commented Apr 11, 2016 at 11:54
  • @spark - Those tests don't always detect mechanical problems. If your drive is "clicking" that normally connected to a mechanical problem.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 11, 2016 at 18:17

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