Resolved Strange clicking noise

Hi guys,

Recently my Mums PC has been getting a clicking noise, quite often when she first starts it up in the morning. It will start clicking (sort of like a radiator when it's first heating up), and then restart and say that it cannot find a boot device; which to me points towards the hard drive.

Yesterday was the first time she got a blue screen when it happened, and it done a chkdsk and said that it came up saying there was an orphaned file, I then tried another chkdsk to check it myself, but it came up with nothing. I done a memory diagnostic also just to rule that out.

We've been reading up on a bit, and for some reason people seem to think it could be the CMOS battery, but I don't see how that would cause a clicking noise?

The only things I can think of is either the Hard drive, the CPU fan or PSU fan seeing as they're the only things that realistically can click. There is a graphics card in there but there isn't a fan on it, just a heat sink.

The PC is running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit. 4GB of RAM, a Intel i3 3.3GHz quad core processor and is made by HP. It's a p6-2022uk.

Any help on the matter would be appreciated.

Cheers.

 

I have to agree with the H/D going byby solution.
Just recently worked on a clients computer with the same problem.
When the noise stopped ,so did the computer.
I did all the testing I could possibly do.
Data recovery software (SpinRite) could not even see the H/D.
Opened the top cover and found tiny pieces of metal (H/D read/write head).
If you haven't backed-up then oops.
If the data on the H/D is something you would like to recover send the drive to
a place specializing recovery.
DO NOT OPEN THE DRIVE YOUR SELF.

 

Everything is backed up.

Spoke to HP/PC World support and they said it could be a faulty SATA bus? I've been trying to find a motherboard diagnostic tool or SATA bus diagnostic tool but no luck. Does anyone know of any? The mother board of a Cupertino3.

I'm gonna try changing the cable later to one that I know works properly too, and also try it on a different SATA bus, but would rather be able to rule that out entirely.

 

Also, had a blue screen on the 30th of May, have used Blue Screen Viewer to see it.

Have updated the Sound Card drivers, but I don't think this issue is related to the hard drive clicking.

 

It's definitely the hard drive, had a listen this morning, it sounded bad enough when starting up, have ordered a new hard drive.

I assume that ghosting the current hard drive to the new hard drive won't cause any issues with the new one with it being a mechanical issue on this drive? If that is the case, what software do you guys recommend for ghosting it over?

 

Is there a method to check for any damaged data?

Will get hold of that when I can, cheers

 

chkdsk

 

Done that a few times, and it didn't bring up any errors for me, so I'll take a punt and ghost it over.

Cheers guys.