'Chuntering' hard drive

Dear Helper

My hard drive has taken to 'chuntering' continually. I have probed around a little to find out why, without sucess. It is a very distracting activity. I hope this is a rasonable request for help.

Chris Woodhouse

 

Check the programs that are running. Hold down the CTRL & ALT keys, press Del once. Choose a program that's running and End Task on it. Test the system for a while without this one program, see if the hard drive thrashing quits. Don't End Task on Explorer or Systray, leave them running. Some programs are stubborn and don't want to close. You may have to End Task on them 3 or 4 times to get them to close.

Don't reboot after closing a program, it's most likely set to run every time Windows starts. Restarting the system will start the program running again.

Doing a bit of maintainence on the hard drive couldn't hurt either. Using Windows Explorer, delete everything that's in the \Temp and \Windows\Temp folders.

Run Scandisk and Disk Defragmentor: Start - Programs - Accessories - System Tools.

Sure it is.

 

Does the drive make this same noise while you are starting the computer? If so, the drive may be near the end of its life and you may want to start to back things up that are important to you.

Most drives have 3 year warranties.....check the manufacturer's website (for the hard drive) to check to see where you stand for the warranty period.

 

Yes... back up everything!... even if you think it isn't dying. It is better to be safer than sorry. Also... if you check with your manufacturer as Candy suggested you might be in luck because if they will replace it and if it has been some time since you bought it... they usually will give you a much bigger one.

 

Having checked all my tech glossaries, I find that "chuntering" is a non-standard term.

If by that you mean that it's making strange sounds that it didn't use to make, I'd strongly recommend backing up irreplaceable data ASAP. The mechanisms are typically so quiet that all you hear is a muffled clicking (except for some older Quantum Bigfoots that would scare the pants off someone accustomed to a quiet drive). Any abnormal sound is a sure sign of grief in the making.

If on the other hand you mean that the sounds aren't different, but there are a lot more of them, the drive might be seriously in need of a good session of Scandisk and Defrag.

If the drive has suddenly become considerably more active with no significant software added, check to see if Windows is still recognizing all the system RAM (checkable by holding the Windows logo key and pressing Pause/Break, which brings up the System Properties screen). A RAM stick that went west can result in more frequent use of the swap file on the hard drive.