Incredibly loud noise from Laptop

Avoriaz

This morning my wife’s Dell laptop (about 4 years old running XP) had a Blue Screen of Death followed by the most incredibly loud noise. She came upstairs to get me and I could hear the noise from up there.

The laptop was on the kitchen table making the most unbelievably high pitched loud noise, a bit like an electric drill. It was also vibrating and shaking quite a bit. The screen was blue with white text scrolling at speed.

I held down the power switch until it switched itself off.

I presumed that only the hard disk going berserk could have made such a loud noise. It was far too loud for a fan spinning out of control

Amazingly, it booted up again perfectly normally. I was fully expecting a dead hard disk.

Windows reported a fatal driver error but nothing else.

I have run an AVG virus check with nothing found. I haven’t checked the hard disk yet but Mrs A says it is all working normally.

If it was the hard disk I am amazed that it has survived.

What else might have caused all that noise and vibration? It is a hard to believe that a 2.5 inch disk, even running totally out of control, could make so much noise and vibration. I don’t think it was the DVD drive. That has not been used for months and there is no disk in there.

Everything is backed up and I have a spare disk available in case it fails soon so my question is more curiosity than needing help and advice.

But any advice about what I could and should do would be welcome.

jayme1

well I've had computers make exactly the same noise/vibration with a CD/DVD in the ODD when something (usually a program crashed) has gone wrong, I guess it could have also happened with no DVD in as when a computer is starting up it checks the ODD for media, since it was a driver error perhaps it couldn't control it so just never stopped spinning making the noise/vibration.

Avoriaz

I'll try reading a CD or DVD when I have time and see what happens.

fwor

Are you sure that the sound was not coming from the laptop's built-in speakers? A high pitched tone through these at full volume would probably make it shake and rattle about a bit.

It seems a bit unlikely that a component like a HDD which is designed to run quietly could make that much noise without quickly destroying itself.

Avoriaz

Good point. I hadn't thought of that.

I did rush down half asleep as I was having a lie in after a few days away so I wasn't at my most perceptive.

I suppose I will never really know as the laptop appears to be 100% ok now.

closed

backed up with a disk image?

might run better with avast