m17x hard drive issue.

Ive been having a weird issue with my hard drives since getting the system and am unsure of the culprit. Every few minutes or even sometimes every few seconds my hard drive will click when it does my system becomes unresponsive. After about a second it will work fine again. This happens in all programs (including my typing out this post). It is not dropping key strokes or anything because i can continue to type while its happening and the laptop catches up fine. Any idea what could cause an issue like that, ive been thinking it may be a chipset driver issue with Windows 7.

 

BSODs will soon follow. You disk is going bad.

Edit: BYW, run HDtune to see what kind of damage there is.

 

seconded

 

I had teh same issue too... it clicks from tiem to time, and i even notice game pauses whne it happens (like in wow). Do you have the 500gb HD?

 

actually, I would boot to your resource cd and try the hard drive diagnostic. It doesn't matter if another utility finds the drive bad. Dell will always ask for the results of their own diagnostic. Gone are the days where you have to rely on someone else's diagnostic.

Thanks,
Gabe

 

Im just about to run the diagnostic before i do though i wanted to post a second question. Another issue i have been having is that while playing games my laptop will take periodic FPS hits, for example in World of Warcraft ill be playing at like 80FPS and then it will drop down to like 15FPS for a second and then over the next 5 seconds work its way back up to 80FPS. Could this possible be related to the hard drive issue or is this a video card issue?

 

Did this with Sony and their program said it was a memory issue vs a hdd issue. HDtune will give more info while normally vendor diagnostics program will give you a meaningless code. Best to know for sure what is wrong with the disk first. Once that's established you can run any diagnostics program Dell wants you to do.

 

Is the scenery changing when this happens? I would blame video driver first. Gabe will tell you to run the Dell diagnostics program.

 

running the HDtune error scan now.

 

Well ive run the HDtune error scan, had no errors. I dont even see a way to test the hard drive in dell's diagnostics.

 

When you test it out through hdtune does it give you the option to select each drive individually for testing?

 

No just the Raid 0 array

 

You probably have a bad hard drive, call alienware tech support, have them diagnose your PC for two hours and then they will send you new HDD.

 

Any way to verify it?

 

Well you can run some HDD benchmark and test but if they don't run I guess you have your answer. You need to call asap AW so they can replace them.

Remember that time is against you in this because they will be a big pain past the 21 days return policy date.

 

If you don't have a backup of your important stuff now is the time to do it. I don't know of a program that can properly do a scan of a Raid 0 setup. Maybe the pay version of hdtune. Hopefully someone will come on with a suggestion. Otherwise you need to break the Raid, re-install the OS on one disk and then do the scan of each individual disk.

 

OK, in Dell diagnostics if you go under Custom test then Hard Drives see if it lists each hard drive individually. If so run the confidence test on each one. That looks like it's verifying blocks.

 

The diagnostic CD i downloaded from dell dosent have any hard drive tests.

 

You need to boot of the resource DVD that came with your system.

 

Did it work for you?

 

Sry it took so long to respond but the hard drive tests take forever. I used the Alienware resource DVD which had hard drive tests. It will able to test each hard drive separately, neither hard drive had any errors.

 

That could be bad news because hard disks are obviously easy to replace. So now we're talking controller or system board. I would suggest running the diagnostics test on the rest of the system. If it still comes up clean try a reinstall of the OS but it really sounds hardware related.

 

I was sitting at work today and was thinking about this issue. It occured to me that i really noticed the issue while using Firefox, then i started to think about how i experinced it while playing World of Warcraft also. I'm almost positive that when it occured while running World of WarCraft i had Firefox open also. I hit the mozillazine forums and saw a post but a few others who described the same issue minus the hard drive click. When i get home i will test it out making sure not to run Firefox 3.5 im hoping that this is just a simple software bug.

 

Well i just got home from work, and i went straight to this site VIA internet explorer. I still am hearing the hard drive click i originally reported but my system is not locking up for a second like it was with Firefox 3.5. Now i just need to figure out if this click that i am hearing is normal header movement or a header problem.

 

let me know whne you find out, sicne i am having teh same issue... thansk in advance

 

If you haven't seen this yet. LINK

 

i listened to the audio file on that page mandrake and my click is nowhere near that frequent i get a single click that will occur ocassionally sometimes once a minute sometimes it wont occur for awhile.

 

i got a replacement HD today, cloned my old Hd, and isntalled.... ill test thoughly tomorrow, and will keep you updated

 

I said screw it and called for a replacement, mine should be comming today.

 

It's not a consistent click. Depending on the damage it will sound different.

 

Just love Dell's warranty. Sony had me ship my wife's whole system for the same problem.

 

By the way, so far no noises form the HD... and i can definitely say (even though its kind of obvious) its not an OS, or fragmentation issue... because i did an exact cloning of the old HD to the new one (same blocks and partitions). So i think its definitely a bad HD.

 

Glad to hear you got it fixed before it really went south on you. Nothing worse then a HD failure and being unable to recover your beloved data.

 

Again, everything is going great... But on a side note, I also used to experiecne occasional stutering on some games (like wow) and on apps (lixe IE). It as a randome 1 sec pause.
Since the HD change, no stuters.... so people experiencing some stuter issues muight want to to also consider the HD as a source of the problem.

 

good to know, now we just need some more mature video drivers and everything should be prefect.

 

well i got my new hard drive installed, no more clicking!

 

and let me guess, no more (or reducedz) 1 second stuters on games?

 

well now my other hard drive has started this clicking , im thinking these 500GB hard drives are crappy.

 

Was the new hard drive sent by dell? <--- edit: nvm, read that it was.

Now I'm thinking I should just get 320gb hdds instead...