Please Help Computer has Drives that Click
I have a pentium III computer that has a motherboard / adapter which I
believe
is bad (SERIAL NUMBER 304733-5057856) because every hard drive...3 now
that i
connect to it has a clicking noise...or at least I hear a clicking
noise from the computer. When I put the hard drive in another
computer it works. I've tried both IDE connectors on the motherboard.
Is there a diagram of this kind of motherboard to reference?
What can I do about it?
It could be a problem with the power supply. If the 12V is a little
on the low side, it could contribute to flaky drive operation. I've
noticed, on two failing power supplies here, I start to hear a bit
of wavering in the pitch of the fixed speed system cooling fan, and
that is a hint that the power supply may be about to fail. You can
use a multimeter and a spare Molex drive connector, as a means to
access the +12V and +5V voltages and check them. My last power supply
had leaking capacitors inside, and that is what was causing it to
fail.
If you suspected the problem was with the ribbon cable interface
on the motherboard, you can use a PCI IDE card to bypass the problem.
You would shut down and unplug, install the PCI IDE card, boot
up, install the driver for the PCI IDE card, then shut down
and move the boot drive over to the PCI IDE card. I have
several Promise Ultra133 TX2 cards here, that I use for such
purposes. It seems Promise has stopped making those, and
there are some poorer substitutes for sale at retail. (I
even got one of those cards, packaged inside a Maxtor
retail drive purchase a few years back, so check your
junk pile and you might already have one of those cards.)
A drive could overheat, if it wasn't being cooled properly,
but at least you'd get some operation from it, before
it got too hot. The drive might freeze and stop
responding in that case.
The clicking is a "seek to zero" attempt. It means the
drive has lost its notion of position, it cannot read
the desired sector, so it moves the head assembly back
to track 0.
Also, be absolutely sure the sound is actually coming
from the drive. There are other things inside the computer
that might make the clicking sound. The sound might even
come from the computer speakers. The Vcore circuit can
make sound, depending on the conditions it is under.
Those are a few ideas.
I'd concentrate on the power supply, as their failure is
a high probability. And in the case of some products
(Emachines with Bestec power supply ?), if the power
supply actually fails completely, it kills the motherboard.
On my computers here, if I get a warning of trouble,
I replace the supply before it dies completely. It
can be subtle things - fixed fan speed won't stay
steady, a little puff of smoke at startup,
weird sizzling sounds only for the first 10 seconds,
and so on.
Paul
-Dave