My Dell 8100 has just started behaving weirdly. Quite frequently it freezes for a long time, clocking, and strange sounds coming from inside. The sound is very similar to a floppy drive when retrying. However, there is no floppy inserted, and the sound is coming more from where the hard drive is located.
This behavior happens even if the machine is just sitting idle. That is, the noise starts up for a while.
After a while, the sound stops and the system functions normally.
The system was recently reburned with XP Home, and I do not believe there are any viruses, spyware, or malware, as I am very careful about such, with a NAT router, firewall, Anti-virus and anti-spyware. There are no new or unknown processes in the Task Manager.
Oh, yeah, SP2 was applied a couple of weeks ago.
Although this questions is probably more appropriate in some other section, I am putting it in the Hardware section because of the noise.
I am thinking Gibson Research's SpinRite might be a good investment.
Any ideas?
backup , backup , backup.
If this clunking is coming from the HDD then it is only a matter of time before the drive will fail.
What make of HDD is it? cause there are tools provided for free by most of the major manufacturers that will test & verify your drive.
ie powermax for maxtor HDD's
http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm
seatools for seagate
http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/
Hitachi
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
etc