Hard Drive making high pitched noises

[Guest]

After installing Vista RC1, I noticed my hard drive is making audible high
pitched noises. The pattern of the noise is 1 second steady beep-like noise,
then maybe .1 second silence. When I create disk activity, the noise alters
or disappears. I did not have this noise when running Windows XP. I have a
Dell Latitude D810 with a Pentium M 1.73 and 1 GB RAM.

It is possible that it isn't the hard drive making the noise, but seems like
the most likely culprit.

Any ideas?

 

[Phillips]

I'd look for overheating, poor connectors (power, IDE or SATA cable).
Next, you can run a hard-drive 'health' tool form a CD or other media - most
hard-drive manufacturers have such tools on their websites and Dell might
have one as well.
Chkdsk and defrag might also help - the heads might be in a sort of loop
cause of corrupted or overly fragmented files or file table.
Some drives spin down on idle - this one might be trying.
If you have files that you need to backup/save, make sure you do that first.
Michael

 

[Guest]

Thanks a bunch, these are great suggestions. I am thinking it may be an
overheating issue, because Vista is just working my laptop a lot harder than
XP did, but I am not certain. I will try each of your suggestions and post
back if I figure it out.