Vista+Periodic Hard Drive Clicking

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[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 22, 2004
Messages
1,711
Before you guys rush to tell me that I have a bad drive let me say that this problem appears to be restricted to Vista. I have done much reading on the internet and was unable to determine a specific cause of this phenomena.

The click happens from time to time and only produces a single click.

I think I know what is going on but I am not sure.

Do any of you think that thjis is the sound of the heads unloading in the drive? I thought it had to do with some funky new feature in Vista's power managment. I am running SP1 RC1 on my machine and have disabled the function which turns off the hard drive in Vista's power managment (both when plugged in and on battery (since I have a UPS)). This does not stop the periodic clicking.

Lastly, if I boot back into XP I do NOT hear the clicking.

Any ideas what Vista is doing?
 
I having the same problem again now that i reinstalled vista. Last month i spent about 3 hours researching the problem and found that a specific update was causing it. Once i uninstalled it, there was no more clicking. I believe it was in the microsoft fourms but i cant seem to find it anymore. What it does is shut down my drive and restarts then there is a 3 second delay in whatever app im using. This damaged my raptor drive and had to send it in for warranty, now I'm afraid its going to do it again =\

Help me look for the update to remove, if i find it ill post it.
 
Awesome, I've been having problems with that 'click' thing too and I was starting to worry (Vista/32 Intel-ICH9R Seagate-7200.10) . Many thanks for finding that JPC! At the end of that thread a poster said that SP1RC1 fixed it for him so I think I'm gonna give it a shot (plus the network copy fix would be cool to have too).
 
When I first installed Vista I would notice I could hear my hard drives spinning up while the OS was on. Turned out that by default some power saving feature was enabled that shut down an inactive hard drive after 20 minutes. Removed that, and that was that. Though my drives didn't click... do your when you power on the system?
 
blade52x said:
When I first installed Vista I would notice I could hear my hard drives spinning up while the OS was on. Turned out that by default some power saving feature was enabled that shut down an inactive hard drive after 20 minutes. Removed that, and that was that. Though my drives didn't click... do your when you power on the system?
Click to expand...

I saw that power saving thing too, 20 minutes till hard drive is powered down, and I changed it to 'never' as well. Still got the 'Click' thing though.

For those who've had a hard drive go bad, the 'click' sounds Exactly like the good ole' click-o-death, when you know your HD is going down. You know the score... normal hard drive activity, then a big 'Click!', then normal activity. It was a brand new computer/hard drive so I was dreading an RMA.

Good news though, I installed SP1rc after my last post and I've yet to get any 'clicks' so far. I'm still on the fence as it didn't do it 100% of the time before, but so far so good.
 
I had a HD problem in Vista for a while too. Occasionally I would hear noises like it was trying to access data even when I wasnt doing anything. Fixed it by disabling the Superfetch service. Left power saving on though.

Dunno if this is relevant to the clicking youre having.
 
Superfetch is a good thing. It sounded like it was accessing your drive because it was. It was organizing and tuning things to give you snappier performance. It only does it when you're not doing anything else. That's why you heard it when it wasn't doing anything.

Why don't people do any research on what their OS is doing before turning features off?
 
Im glad that thread helped some of you, took me a while to find it. Couldn't post earlier because something is really, REALLY wrong with my system.

I think my PSU is dieing... I know i can blame vista for that but it makes me wonder lol.

Two weeks ago i upgraded my video card and from what i read it took about 60w more then my last one. I called pc power and cooling and i was told my PSU could handle it. So i reinstalled vista just to get a clean start with my new video card and... :confused:

Im getting a weird 30 sec delay where i cant do anything but move my mouse around the screen. Something like this happened when my first raptor drive died. But i got a new drive, i cant believe vista could do this again. But I did use my PC with the killer update from hell(KB938979) for three days, till i found the thread i posted above =\

My error log is also showing a hole lot of these back2back: The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0.

When im lucky i can resume work, other times i get a hard lock or a BSOD...

Im getting a new PSU tomorrow, i hope that solves my problems :rolleyes:
 
Nexnecis said:
Awesome, I've been having problems with that 'click' thing too and I was starting to worry (Vista/32 Intel-ICH9R Seagate-7200.10) . Many thanks for finding that JPC! At the end of that thread a poster said that SP1RC1 fixed it for him so I think I'm gonna give it a shot (plus the network copy fix would be cool to have too).
Click to expand...


Thanks for the update on SP1RC1, I didn't see that. Ill give it a shot tomorrow let you know if it works since I'm reinstalling vista again for the 6th time in two weeks... :rolleyes:
 
Decibel said:
Superfetch is a good thing. It sounded like it was accessing your drive because it was. It was organizing and tuning things to give you snappier performance. It only does it when you're not doing anything else. That's why you heard it when it wasn't doing anything.

Why don't people do any research on what their OS is doing before turning features off?
Click to expand...

I dunno if "Superfetch is a good thing" it seems to wana do it own thing when i wana do my own thing and i think i should have a say in the matter lol

I have a whole lot of vistas "features" disabled and i see a good performance increase in my system =P
 
i had the same exact issue...i tried disabling superfetch, indexing, and readyboost with no luck. i uninstalled whatever update it was that was supposed to be causing it. I went to each of my hard drive's properties and disabled indexing with no luck.

however, after installing the service pack 1 (release candidate version), it seems to have went away! if possible, try installing the service pack and see if it works.

EDIT: didn't see that it was mentioned earlier...lol, well more support for SP1RC1 i guess :rolleyes:
 
I have sent another hard drive back because of this damn update, and was really frustrated from my new hard drive for the clicking and hesistation.

This NEEDS TO BE A STICKY. I think most people are assuming this is a hardware problem, and I never would have guessed a Vista Update would cause this.

Thank You so so so much for letting me know how to fix it.
 
I have not noticed the clicking with my newer drive (now with SP1 RC Refresh installed). I am not sure if this is due to the fact that I cannot hear it because my case is back together, or if the clicking has stopped.

I sure would not mind what causes this phenomena!
 
Thank god for this thread. I'm running Vista 64bit and found the power settings and disabled them and the click went away
 
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