Hard disk woes

Hello,

I have recently noticed a constant high pitched noise (so high that its barely audible, its very soft) coming from my PC. After opening it and listening, I believed the noise is coming from one of my hard disks (or possibly, but unlikely, both). After much googling I decided to switch on my PC with one hard drive removed, and then with the other removed, and then with both removed to see if the noise was still there. It seems the noise is only really present when 1 of my hard drives (the 40gb one) is in there.

After looking over many forums and whatnot, the general impression I get is that a high pitched noise coming from the HDD means that it is going to fail. However the program I have installed that utilises SMART claims that it is not going to fail until 2020. There have been some fairly large changes in characteristics like Raw Read Error rate (+7), is this indicative on imminent fail? Should I trust SMART's estimation? or the forums? Is it a very loud high pitched whir, or the soft one I described (or both), that is a symptom of failure to happen? I can't really tell from any forums / information pages.


In any case if I were to back up the data on the hard drive, could I back it up as an image on a larger hard drive (for free, and reliably) - and - when I used that new drive instead, have everything work as it did before (I have GRUB loader, I'm running my pc with dual OS, windows xp and ubuntu linux)?

 

I would suspect any hard drive that suddenly makes noise. I have had a few fail, I reformated them, and they worked for a while, but they were put in non critical rigs. You can pick up a 320GB SATA drive at newegg, and usually an IDE drive for under $100.

If the drive in question was mine, I would replace it if it was critical to me. Sometimes they take a long time to die. As far as copying the data, I love XXClone, a free program on the MajorGeeks site http://majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=5534.

Sweet little free drive cloning program. I have only used it with WinXP, not sure about the Linux part of it though.

Good luck, and keep us posted!

E

 

Have not taken any action as of yet, but will most likely buy a new hard drive, and use a linux utilty to clone the suspect hard drive on the new one.

Any recomendations for dealing with grub? I want to make it so that I can boot into ubuntu (on my slave drive, which is not making worrying noises aplenty) directly. I tried swapping master (windows) and slave (ubuntu linux) around, but this doesn't work. How do I get rid of grub without damaging my windows disk? Should this thread be moved to software/linux now. I really would appeciate help with this.