Yesterday a friend of mine came to me with a question. For the last year or so, her laptop has been clicking at regular intervals. She described it as a very fast ticking clock. She asked me what it was, why it was clicking, and what it meant for her. Her hard drive was a suspect, but she didn’t have the proof. That’s where I came in…A running joke amongst techies is the ticking time bomb. This refers to the clicking that hard drives make before they crash in a horrible cacophony. It might be a high pitched whine followed by a black or blue screen. It might also sounds like a plastic spoon in a garbage disposal. It all depends on the nature of the crash. The problem with the clicking is that there’s no way to determine how long a clicking hard drive will tick before it dies. It might be as short as seconds. In my friend’s case, it’s over a year so far. Here are the steps I told her to take:
- BACKUP ALL IMPORTANT DATA. I cannot stress the importance of this. If you have files you don’t want to lose, this should be a habit anyway. For most of us though, it’s not. Therefore, an immediate backup is critical. The built-in Windows backup system can be iffy so I recommend using a program like Winzip($30) or 7-Zip(free) to compress all the data you want and write it to CDs or DVDs. Winrar can be used to break up large backups to span across multiple CDs. This is my preferred approach.
- Run a disk diagnostic. Today only, Giveaway of the Day is offering HDDlife for Notebooks for free. This program is normally $50, but for today it’s 100% free. This is a monitoring program for Laptop hard drives which will report the current health of a drive. The same company makes programs for Desktops and there’s a free version. The free version will run scans and report the ‘health’ of the hard drive in a percentage. This may be enough to determine when a hard drive needs to be replaced.
- Run a defrag. The Windows Defragmentor can detect bad sectors on hard drives. These are locations where data can not exist. A high number of bad sectors is indicative of a dying drive.
- Replace the hard drive if necessary. Either do it yourself or have someone do it for you. If the hard drive dies it’s obvious that it needs a replacement. If the hard drive is in bad shape, buy a new one as your primary drive. You can choose to live dangerously and use the bad drive until it crashes. Just remember to keep backing it up.
Unfortunately, hard drive health determination isn’t an exact science. All the indicators may be lies. It’s also completely within the realm of possibility for a super healthy hard drive to unexpectedly die. The only protection you have against a hard drive crash is backing up your data.
0 Responses to “Clicking laptop hard drive.”