Hard drive randomly beeps/clicks multiple times causing computer to freeze.

I was wondering if I could get some advice on this problem. Sorry this is so long, but I guess I wanted to be thorough. The hard drive in my Asus g50vt x5 laptop will seemingly randomly lockup. I cannot find any pattern that makes this consistently happen. Basically, I'll be using my laptop like normal and the hard drive will start beeping. This beeping sound will occur at least 20 times. Sometimes, I can continue to use certain applications while doing this, but I can't save any work or open another application. Anyway, after a certain number beeps, the whole computer freezes/locks up and I have to do a hard shut down and boot it back up (only once have I ever received a BSOD from this). Additionally, sometimes the hard drive will also make a clicking sound after each beep. Finally, I'm not sure if the beeping is actually specifically coming from the hard drive, but I have localized the sound to the same place the clicking noise comes from.

Now, a little background. I've had this laptop for about a month. After owning it for 2 weeks, I updated the video card drivers, which inexplicably caused me to be unable to boot my computer without receiving a BSOD (even in safe mode). So, I just gave up and reinstalled Vista from scratch. After the reinstallation, this beep/freezing problem occured for the first time and it happened very, very frequently. At this point, I gave up and took it back to Best Buy. They tested it, but found no problems, so they just reinstalled Vista for me. After that, the laptop performed perfectly (normal use, heavy use, gaming, etc). Now, though, after 1.5 weeks, the same clicking/freezing problem is back with a vengeance. It's happened at least 6 times today. Humorously, my latest crash happened when I took the external speaker plug out of the input jack.

So with that, here's what I've done:

1. Event Viewer: Nothing consistent or telling gets displayed to the logs before a crash.
2. Vista's Error checking: I run it, but it seems to quit/disappear half way through. Maybe that's normal, but I never get a confirmation message saying the scan completed or anything.
3. Hard Drive Diagnostics: I have a Seagate Momentus drive. I've run all of the tests in the SeaTools suite, and all of the come back as Passing (including SMART). The only one that didn't was the Long Drive Self Test, but that thing takes so long to run, that it was inevitable for my computer to crash before it finished.

Okay, all that said, is there anything else I can do? Or, why does it suddenly happen after functioning normally for a long period of time? I think it's fairly safe to say that the drive is bad, and I've already backed up all my stuff. However, I need to be able to consistently make it fail, or else Best Buy won't do anything, like last time. Or does someone have any other ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks for any help/advice.

 

Hard drives don't beep. Hard drives click. The beeping is probably your computer telling you that your hard drive is borked. If the drive always crashes during the diagnostics test, you can just show Best Buy that the drive doesnt' pass the test. The HDTune test is probably a bit faster; you can try running that and seeing if it turns up any bad sectors.

 

Interesting, so seatools is not finding any errors, but the drive is not functioning properly.
I have taken harddrives apart and the drive will make a beeping noise if the actuator arm gets stuck. I have never seen this happen while the drive was spinning though. Usually it happens when the drive initially tries to power up.

As far as what you should do, have you run a DOS based disc check?
That may be more effective than going into windows, especially if their are any software issues getting in the way.

Judging from your post it seems like the problem can be purely software related for the problem to go away after a re-installation. However it does not make sense why a software issue could cause this.

I would send the drive back to Seagate for RMA. It is probably the best you can do. Seagate has been having quite the problem the last year manufacturing harddrives due to poor firmware.

K-TRON

 

Thanks for the responses. I wasn't sure on the beeping source. From what I had researched, everyone said it was just the motherboard. But since it beeped so many times, and especially with each click, that was confusing to me.

Commander Wolf: I ran HDTune and everything passed. Also, everything passed on the SeaTools tests too.

K-TRON: I ran chkdsk and five attribute records did come up as corrupt. However, I am having a ridiculous time trying to run chkdsk c: /F on restart. It won't run automatically even though I tell it too. And I've been having trouble getting a dos boot disk to work that has a plain prompt. Anyway, I'll keep working on that.

Unfortunately, as far as the RMA goes, I'm about 2 companies removed from having that capability. The Asus laptop was bought from Best Buy, so I have to go through them for anything, and I doubt they'd be willing to put in a new hard drive on my word alone.

However, since you seem to know about hard drives, I was curious if you have an opinion on this. Could there be some malfunction on a hard drive's write capabilities if the drive was stressed to a certain point?

The reason I ask, is that the first time this problem occurred was when I was downloading/reinstalling a large amount of drivers and applications, taking care of window's updates, and using the OS for basic tasks (searching, moving folders, browsing the internet).

Yesterday, I was doing another form of this, I had multiple torrents going that were writing a large amount of files to my drive while I was doing basic OS tasks at the same time.

Yet, so far today, I've had no problems. Everything is back to normal. Tonight, I'm going to try running multiple torrents again to see if I can reproduce this. Or, perhaps you know of a good tool/program that'd accomplish large amounts of reads/writes for me?

Thanks

 

If you download Crystalmark's Crystal DiscMark, you can write 1000MB files to your harddrive. There is a pulldown with numbers from 1-8. Choose 8
It will write 1000mb files 8 times to your drive. It should take a few minutes of very heavy load to your drive, so try that.
You can also run 4K and 512kb file runs on the drive, which will strain it. If it fails, than the drive needs to be replaced.
http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html

If you own the laptop, you can rma it direct to seagate. You do not need to go through BestBuy.

Back up all of your files while it still works.

K-TRON

 

Well, I am just beyond confused here. I ran the DiscMark program with the settings you suggested, but there were no problems. And I used the computer for a couple hours after that with no freezing.

So I attempted to duplicate the conditions from yesterday by downloading torrents, listening to music, browsing the web, etc. Within 10 minutes of having uTorrent open, it beeps/freezes. And then it occured 3 more times within 40 minutes. Okay, so as weird as this sounds, let's not use uTorrent anymore, as that's the biggest wildcard. After stopping its use, my computer doesn't freeze. So I decided to download azureus (vuze). I thought I had a winning idea, but 40 minutes later, it beeped/crashed again....only this time, my computer wouldn't boot up to windows anymore. It hit a slash screen and did nothing.

At this point, I called Geek Squad. Removing the battery and draining the internal power caused it to boot again. Great, but what's causing all of this? The tech support guy thinks the computer is overheating. Now, I know by my temperatures, a normal laptop would not be overheating. I've been monitoring everything, and the hottest temperature I've made it to is 57 degrees C on one of the core CPUs. Usually though, the temperature is about 45-49.

So, what do you think? Perhaps there's some faulty hardware that overheats at lower temperatures. I would say possible, but I've been using my computer normally (even playing games on it) for the past week. The geek squad guy wants me to buy a laptop cooler, but is it really up to me to spend money on a cooler I shouldn't need in order to test a hypothesis? That doesn't even address why my hard drive is clicking either! I hope not all laptop experiences are like this.

I'll probably call Seagate tomorrow, and see if they have any ideas.

Oh, and also, I am still unable to run chkdsk /F to fix those corrupt records. If anyone cares, see this thread: http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...board_id=3&model=G50Vt&page=1&SLanguage=en-us

 

These harddrive testers are sketchy at best. I have had numerous HDDs test fine, just to crap out shortly after. Obviously the HDD was having problems or I would not be testing it. I would say your HDD is toast. I had one go south last week and it was doing the same thing you describe.

 

See to it that the hard disk is properly attached, or not damaged. I have encountered this when I somehow bumped my CPU really hard..