Click/Beep..then freeze solid

Hi all. Just joined so bear with my silly questions. I did a search and see some other people have the click/beep issue but didn't see anything that I can point to as a solution.

The laptop = P-7805u
OS = Vista 64

Problem = about once a month or every other month the hard drive will make a beep. On a really bad day it will fall into a cycle of click..beep..click..beep..etc forever and I have to shut it down hard (hold power button).
Upon restart I run chkdsk and often it finds a few corrupt files. Last time it wouldn't start up well and it offered to restore to a previous restore point. I said "why of course" and all is well.

I have run "Seatools" to check the entire drive and is says no problems.

Any thoughts as to what is causing this? Usually happens when I play Stronghold 2 or am surfing the web.

thanks,

Will

 

Thats usually a sign of either a bad drive produced from the start... or slowly dying...I would invest in a backup drive and make sure you have all your needed files/documents... My harddrives (in Raid 0) make a click every once in a while but its just from operation....

Let me ask you a few things:

-On average how long do you run your laptop per day? or if you ever turn it off?

-What virtual memory setting do you have currently?

 

I have had the laptop since May 08. It has done this to me probably 5 times in total and usually it is pretty easy to fix - check disk and few corrupt files.

I run the laptop about 5 hours each night and shut it down every night.

How do I check virtual memory?

 

control panel> system> advance system settings> under "performance" click settings> then "advanced tab" and it will show you how much virtual memory is being utilized...

Another thing to question about is how much space you have left on the harddrive

 

Virtual memory used = "currently allocated" 4389 MB. Recommended=6133MB
HD space = 121 left of 268 gig. I have had less space but removed some games I no longer play. Did a defrag after that and defrag monthly if I remember.

I don't think the drive is bad as it only does this one a month or every two. Just think something is corrupting files. It fixed the problem last time by restoring to a previous restore point.

Maybe I need to check firmware and other goodies like that but I really don't understand what they do/mean.

 

Are there anyother programs that you run related to the harddrive at all? What defrag program do you use? Also you might want to defrag once a week if you can...Other than that try and see if there are any background processes under task manager that look strange or have too much usage from any of the components

 

Nothing strange in task manager that I can tell and nothing consuming more than 2% of processor.

I use Auslogics disk defragger as the one built into Vista takes days to run.

I don't run any other harddrive aps besides Seatools once and a while to make sure the Seagate drive is happy. It has never found anything wrong.