Hard Drive making a "squeak"/"click" noise about 3-4 times per evening, if replaced, how to get respawn back? (all powerful)

Hello all!

I've noticed over the last 3-4 days my hard drive (I looked up in the manual to identify the position of it) seems to be producing a squeak noise or/and a click, periodically (once an hour? roughly). I turn it on for about 4 hours a day (come home from work and use it). Didn't drop it or anything and taken good care of the laptop.

In the event of a failure, how do I get back the respawn feature?

I suppose replacing it should be easy judging by the manual, and I just need to go out and buy a good brand 500gb 7200 RPM Laptop hard drive so .... I don't think I'm that worried about that, just worried about respawn more lol.


I don't feel like going through Dell, they'll probably take a week or 2 or get me to send the thing back , although I will if I decide it to be too expensive/tricky.

EDIT: Forgot to confirm, it's a single HD configuration, 500gb. Not sure if they have the caddy installed for the 2nd bay...

What's everyone's thoughts on the squeak? Is there a tool to check what my hard drive manufactuer is so I can get a similar/alternative? Also any tools to check the hard drive to see if it's damaged?

I'm kinda panicking but not really, and I really need to sleep now so I will reply back here in 8-9 hours from work! Thank you all for taking the time to read thread!!

 

If you have the second hard drive caddy, you can move that hard drive to the second hard drive slot, put your new hard drive in the first slot, and using a program like Norton Ghost you can then ghost the second drive to the first drive, and then later remove the second (defective) drive from the system. It will make an exact duplicate (including respawn partition) of your primary hard drive to your new hard drive.

How to get second hard drive caddy:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=392487

 

This is a known issue with the Seagate 500gb 7200RPM drive, there is an issue with the APM feature causing sudden sleep/power up cycles on the HD when they shouldnt be occucring. Since your are not running a RAID setup a fix has been found for this issue in this post: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=5402931&postcount=23

Those of us in a raid setup are currently SOL on this.

 

!!!!

Thank you!!!! This makes me feel much better.

Also, yeh that's what I thought too, it's sleeping/powering down like my external hard drive...., because I only notice it when my machine is idle

So, I don't mind the clicking/squeak, if I ignore it I'm quite safe still, right?

EDIT: Marvie: I will look into investing Norton Ghost, I never considered cloning partitions...

 

Definitely clone the disk if you are worried.
not sure can i say this here, but search for a thing called Hirens Boot CD(latest verison is 10)
DL the ISO and burn it off. Loads of handy utils on it including Ghost

 

Can't do much since I am at work but I assume it's free?

 

Quick bump! I downloaded QuietHDD and basically it doesn't work, I get the IOCTL_ATA_PASS_THROUGH failed: Reason:0x00000000 everytime I try to enable it.

I guess my drive doesn't support it?