hard drive is making a cracking sound on initial seek.

[SimManager]

While working on a system (Gateway) PII 233 / 98 Ram.
The Quantum 3.5 Hard drive stopped responding on initial boot. When the system attempts to seek the drive the Hard drive starts making a continuos beeping or cracking sound. I'm thinking that the drive might have crashed. Can anyone give me some advice as to what I can do. I don't want to have to replace someones old drive.

 

[teknoguy]

run scandisk on it. if there are bad sectors it will pick it up. i like using norton disk doctor from the boot disks they supply. can dos still see the drive??

 

[SimManager]

Tenoguy, the answer is no. The drive isn't seen anywhere.
Thanks for helping out. SimManager

 

[teknoguy]

usually when hard drives start making loud grinding, crunching etc etc noises thats sometimes a sign that the drive has committed suicide. go to dos and type "fdisk" and see if it detects a drive.

 

[DavePL]

That same problem happened to us. We have a Quantum Bigfoot 2.5 GB harddrive, running Windows 95. At first we could boot it in DOS. Then we ran scandisk and it found hundreds of dammaged files. Then tried to run setup from the cab files, and it gave error messages like: "destination drive full" or "out of memory". Then after rebooting, the C: drive was no longer recognizable. When running fdisk it said "no fixed disk present". The Bios also could not detect it.
When it starts up you can hear the motor spinning, however it makes strange beeping noises all the time. One time it made a grinding noise.
We were wondering if this is something we can fix ourselves?
We have contacted Ontrack.com, in case we may need to send it for data recovery.

 

[Guest_imported]

if you have norton system works run "norton disk doctor"
if that doesn't work you better send her off to ontrack if the data is that important.