Don’t Avoid The ‘Click Of Death’: React To It!
Amongst the various components that make up a computer system, hard drive is the most sensitive. However, it is responsible to give you headaches when it decides to die on you. This is because it is the storehouse of all your crucial data: the images, videos, documents, audio files and much more. Due to any reason, if the hard drive fails-it means all data is lost!
A clicking sound from hard drive or other relative problems indicates some trouble knocking the system. This is the time when a backup copy of hard drive into an external storage media is stored before the data becomes inaccessible from hard drive or its partition.
Before jumping to conclusions, there are some facts that should be checked out before which might be responsible for clicking noise from hard drive:
- When you work on laptop, make sure that the surface on which it is kept is properly balanced. If it is unbalanced, it might be causing the clicking sound.
- If some other disk, for example CD or DVD is connected with system, it might be responsible for the problem.
What Causes Hard Drive to Click-Click and How to Fix It?
Basically, the clicking or the chunking sound from HDD point towards some physical damage to the Hard Disk Drive. These include:
Head Crash: If the disk platter is damaged, the head of the hard scratches off the surface of disk. When this offers, you notice the clicking/grinding sound. In this situation, the turn off the system and consult disk repair expert. However, it is strictly recommended not to open the HDD and make attempt to fix the problem. Hard disk fixing requires clean environment and proper tools for repairing process.
Bad Sectors: Bad sector in hard disk means that a section of HDD is damaged. If the head of disk reads from same area repeatedly, a clicking sound is made. Another probable reason is that head of disk do not have fine tuning with the servo tracks of the disk because the magnetic domains on the platter have become weak. If there is bad sector on HDD, the specific area cannot be used. There are free disk utilities like CHCKDSK that helps to scan bad sectors on hard disk and helps in new to be written on that damaged area.
Mechanical Faults: Defective spindles can also cause clicking sounds. Also, Read-Write head might be responsible for such problem. In such case, it is advised to replace existing hard drive with a new one.
Virtual Memory Paging: In order to maintain multiple operations within the system when complete physical memory is being utilized, the HDD performs virtual memory paging. Due to this, the disk has to get involved into excessive activities. To work around, it is recommended to increase physical memory of system, i.e. RAM.