Talk:Problem with hard drive clicking

yes it really works! (This comment is two years old. I can't tell to what it is referring. I suggest that this be comment may be removed now.)

I've had hdd clicking from day one when the hdd idles (t42 2378-jzm 40GB). I would suggest that this particular click is not a sign of impending doom. The drive has had heavy use for 18months with out any problems.

I have this clicking sound with a Fujitsu MHV 2060 BH in my Z61m, 3 months old (in March 2007) Firware version 0084002A.

I also believe that the clicking (or ticking as it really seems to be for me) while a very annoying condition is not an abnormal condition and does not indicate that anything bad is happening. I do not believe it indicates any type of hard drive failure. I have had a laptop disk drive in heavy use for almost two years while suffering through the ticking and have not yet experienced any hard drive failures.

I have been very successful with using sync ; sleep 5; sync; hdparm -w /dev/hda to reset the hard drive and stop the ticking. Regardless of the large warning in the hdparm -w man page section I have not seen any data loss. I believe that the small onboard hard drive write cache coupled with having a mostly quiescent system at the time that the command is run probably meanst that I would never see any problem. In a quiescent system the sync;sleep;sync should allow all of the buffers to be written completely througy. But I could believe that if this was done while heavy write activity was occurring that it might create a situation where data in the hard drive write cache might be lost. Eventually the ticking will return and if I am in a quiet envirionment it will be annoying. When that happens I sync and reset the drive and the ticking stops. Before trying this solution rebooting and power cycling the hard drive was the only way to reset and that was very annoying. (Although hibernate, power off, power on, restore from hibernation, means I don't lose anything except about three minutes of my life.)

For me running smartctl -t long /dev/sda1 in the background seems to be a cure for the clicking disease which DRIVES ME CRAZY!!! I have a X41 with a 40GB HD. Seems to work for click free ~41 minutes. All the other methods with hdparm did not help. I don't know whether this is good or not for the HD to run a constant test and it might damage the HD but I don't care. I'm actually surprised the HD is still ok, I can get into a rage because of the clicking and used to bang my fist on it quite a bit. Seagate Utility.iso

SUCCESS in reflashing Seagate Momentus 7200.3 ST9160411ASG OEM with Dell firmware

ATTENTION!

WARNING: I'm NOT liable for ANY damage that may occur by following this report!!! Anything you do would be at your own risk!!!

After getting a Momentus 7200.3 160 GB as a replacement for my dying Samsung HM160HI (bad blocks) from my local computer parts shop, I've installed it into my Thinkpad Z61m (Ubuntu 8.10 & Vista) and soon noticed the notorious clicking noise. Actually it wasn't really loud but nevertheless I wasn't quite happy about it. So I issued

$ hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda 

which made the clicking noise completely disappear but that didn't seem as a good solution to me. After googling on this issue I've found out, that Dell has released a firmware update fixing clicking noise on following Seagate drives built into some Dell notebooks

80G - ST980411ASG DP/N N528F
120G - ST9120411ASG DP/N M412F
160G - ST9160411ASG DP/N G970F
200G - ST9200423ASG DP/N J587F
250G - ST9250421ASG DP/N K850F
320G - ST9320421ASG DP/N N530F 

Although I was somehow afraid of bricking my brand new drive, I've decided to give it a try. So I downloaded R211337.exe from this page and ran the file under Vista. After that under

C:\Dell\Drivers\R211337 

I got a file called Seagate Utility.iso which I burned on a CD and then rebooted my Thinkpad. The bootable CD immediately started firmare update saying something like "Downloading firmware" and showing me a timer that counted from 60 seconds to zero. Then I got "exit code 0 ; press any key to continue" After pressing a key I got the FreeDos promt. So I've just pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del keeping my fingers crossed. Well, it WORKED! After a second or two I got my GRUB menu and booted Ubuntu 8.10. The clicking noises were gone and my drive works flawlessly.

Here is the contents of the sticker on my Momentus 7200.3

Seagate Momentus 7200.3 160GB
Product of China

This drive is manufactured by Seagate for OEM
distribution. For product information or technical 
support, please contact your system OEM

+5V 0.62A
Date: 09175
Site: WU

SN ******** [the same as after firmware update]
ST9160411ASG
PN: 9GEG43-500
FW: SD13 [now hdparm displays DE17 instead]

--Bombenbach 20:13, 19 June 2009 (UTC)