Something is "ticking" my hard drive LED.

squeaky

Jaffa. wrote: »

Have you tried pulling the ethernet cable and seeing if the ticking stops Seriously though, try it...

No change to the above.

Jaffa.

How about resetting the CMOS with the battery out for 30 seconds to clear any odd drive settings in the bios? You should be on fail safe defaults then, er what are the jumpers set to on all the drives? You could try them all on cable select

squeaky

I've been through all the drive settings in the bios. Disconnecting CMOS I'm loth to do for the moment.

C: is master atapi
is master ide

E: (DVD) is slave atapi
F: (DVD) is slave ide

Bios set to accept both.


I have a thunderstorm heading my way. Powering down! FAST!

Jaffa.

squeaky wrote: »

I've been through all the drive settings in the bios. Disconnecting CMOS I'm loth to do for the moment.

C: is master atapi
is master ide

E: (DVD) is slave atapi
F: (DVD) is slave ide

Bios set to accept both.


I have a thunderstorm heading my way. Powering down! FAST!

So much for Sunny Suffolk then

You say you can boot from your ? Try with just the IDE drives

aliEnRIK

Hve you installed the correct drivers for the computer?

squeaky

CMOS flashed - no change

Booted from each HD - no change

Safe mode in each HD - no change

Booted from each HD with other physically disconnected - no change

Found in System Tools or somewhere like that, the setting for indexing which is on, manual,disabled. It was on manual. I set it to disabled. Rebooted - no change.

Headache - no change.

Eyestrain - no change.

Back ache - getting worse.

I've had it for today. I made a mess of the drive types listed above. The slave HD and the slave DVD are both IDE, the masters of each are erm... wotsits.

This is a brand new clean install on a brand new clean computer, so all the drivers are bog standard. A fair few out of date, and, after updating most of them... that's when and why I made post #1. NONE of those drivers are on board and I'm still "ticking".

Paradigm

How old is the drive that is "ticking"? Did it come new with the PC?

I've seen 3 drives like this... 2 failed completely within weeks! The other was down to a faulty power connection, using a spare fixed it.
I've also heard that a failing PSU can cause this on some drives.

Jaffa.

I highly doubt that the drive would be on it's way out.

Is it an intel board? Do you have SMBus drivers?

Paradigm

Jaffa. wrote: »

I highly doubt that the drive would be on it's way out.

Hopefully you're right but I'm curious as to why you would be "highly doubtful"? Even a brand sparkly new drive can be faulty & given everything thats been tried in this thread the possibility shouldn't be dismissed.

Let's face it, most everything else has been tried.

Jaffa.

Paradigm wrote: »

Hopefully you're right but I'm curious as to why you would be "highly doubtful"? Even a brand sparkly new drive can be faulty & given everything thats been tried in this thread the possibility shouldn't be dismissed.

Let's face it, most everything else has been tried.

'the light for my hard drive flashes about once per second. Like a ticking clock.'

It's that above that make me highly doubtful, bad HDD's make random rattling and or make drilling sounds, I take it this ticking is the same noise disk activity makes. Them drilling noises dont always make the HDD light glow at the same time. It sounds disk activity caused by the system (not sure from where like) so it's more likely to be the motherboard, maybe the timing or 'packet error checking' from lack of SMBus drivers and thats causing something to happen with the firmware on the HDD with respect to the other drives. Also when squeaky took the optical drives out it became less noticeable

I guess squeaky could run a chkdsk on the drive(s)? That would highlight any bad sectors, a tale tale sign of a dying disk.

It will be interesting to see what the cause is though