Clicking Sound From Hard Drive

Hey, I bought an envy sleebook 1040-ca (which is like the 1010-us but mine came with 8GB of ram). I've had the laptop for two weeks now and I've been babying it (nothing has happened to it). I reinstalled Windows and installed some other programs I need.

Just yesterday I hear a clicking sound coming from the left side of the laptop where i assume the hard drive sits. The clicking sound occurred every 5-8 seconds and it's a Hitachi model. I did some researching and a lot of people said it was bad news, so I checked around to see if I missed installing any drivers. I missed a BIOS one unrelated to my problem but did it anyways. I restarted the computer, turned it off and went to bed.

Powered on the computer today and the unusual clicking noise is gone, all I hear is the regular hard drive working.

I decided to talk to HP today. First Representative said to reboot and enter a diagnosis center by pressing F2 during reboot and do a hard drive check up. I did two tests taking 2 hours and 5 minutes and everything passed. I went to reconnect today and this man said to disassemble the laptop and take out the hard drive and then reconnect it. I explained to him nicely I cannot do this because I need to disassemble the screen and then other components to access the hardware - He just repeated himself and then added if I can't, I can send it in for a hard drive replacement taking a total of 9 days max.

Thing is this is my only laptop and I am a university student so the computer is very important, I need it to take do the majority of all my work. I also spent countless hours re installing and updating everything so it's perfect...

Some questions:


1. Is it necessary I send it in even though the clicking has stopped as of this morning?

2. If I am able to get a laptop swap from the retailer I purchased it from, is it possible to make an image of the whole drive, copy it onto an external drive, retrieve the new laptop and install the image I made a copy of? Thus, I can avoid reintalling Windows, the programs I want, and the countless hours of Windows updates. If so, what program is able to do this (or, is the Windows backup tool good enough to perform such a task without losing any of my data and restoring everything on a new laptop?).

3. If I do a swap with my retailer or I send it to HP, should I reformat the computer? I have pirated software such as DivX, Microsoft Office, WinRar, etc.

Thanks for the help.

Edit: I also had a second question - Is it possible to swap out the A6 processor for an A10 processor in the envy 6 sleek book? I spoke with HP about it and they said it's impossible to do for this laptop. I don't really trust them though.

 

1. If I were you, i'd just run check disk to see if there's any bad sectors; if it comes back with a lot of errors then it's time to replace the drive. If there's no error and there are no more clicking, you should be fine. Now if you notice that your computer occasionally Freezes (like when you open Internet Explorer and your whole computer, even mouse pointer pauses for like 3 seconds) then you have a problem with the drive.

Sometimes, when you reinstall Windows, especially Windows Vista on up. It does not erase or format your drive since it just creates a folder with your previous OS backed up in there. So even though you've installed a new OS, data written within the new OS has to skip around to find free space since the previous OS still takes up space. Hope you get what I am trying to say.

2. If you could, try to swap the laptop out at the local retailer, that way you wont have to wait for HP.

You could then image your internal drive (using free software like : Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download ) to an external usb drive so that you could recover it later with the new machine.

[edit] added this link http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol.../669573-how-clone-hdd-ssd-symantec-ghost.html very good walkthrough on imaging your drive.

3. I'd reformat the drive after imaging it if I know for sure that Ill be swapping it out whether it be from a retailer or HP.

Good luck