Hard drives making noise after latest critical update

G

George Neuner

Hi all,

Apologies for the cross post - I wasn't sure where best to ask this.

I have a Dell Dimension Pentium III with two hard drives (a Maxtor 120
GB and a Seagate 20GB) running XP pro. The XP install was clean
without any Dell extras - I did it myself as an upgrade from Win98.

After installing the latest batch of "critical" updates which
reference:

KB828035 KB825119 KB823182 and KB824141

both hard drives have both begun to make periodic, very loud, hollow
sounding "thunks" as if the heads are being (forcibly) homed. I have
all BIOS and OS power saving turned off and the power conservation
option on the Maxtor is deactivated (no jumper).

I have current AV software and I'm certain there is no infection. No
other software has been installed since the OS patch.

Has anyone else encountered this and what did you do about it. The
sounds are starting to scare me - I'm worried about possible damage
being done.

Thank,
George
 
R

Rob Schneider

It surely is coincidence that the disks started to make noise after any
update. Sounds like your disks might be "in trouble". take a backup
*now* and get hardware technical support involved.
 
N

Nikhil Tanna

I recently had to reformat my pc and reinstall XP pro using windows xp setup
cd.
A strange thing happening is after reinstall, PC is making lots of fan
noise. It may not be hard drives because when i click on the folders, i get
additional noise of hard drives starting up but that sound is much quiter.

Does anybody know the remedy ? Do fans depend on any driver files ?
I am trying to get some clues here to fix things. I have backup all drivers
before format so I have all previous drivers.

Thanks,
En Tee.
 
C

cimex

Nikhil, is your fan noise variable or constant?
I began having intermittent fan noise that varied a lot in pitch, like a
sports car on a winding mountain road. The noise was so insistent that I
actually recorded it. Then, it abruptly ceased for awhile. This followed a
new HDD and XP by one week. Still a mystery, but mostly it stays away, with
not apparent overheating and zero crashes.
 
N

Nikhil Tanna

Cimex,

Thanks for the reply.
Its constant noise from Fan which started as soon Xp rebooted the system
after install. There is no problem with working of PC, its perfect except
this continues noise.

NT.
 
G

George Neuner

It surely is coincidence that the disks started to make noise after any
update. Sounds like your disks might be "in trouble". take a backup
*now* and get hardware technical support involved.
Click to expand...

Hi Rob,

Home machine - I am tech support. Also I'm a CS who works with
embedded systems and I'm quite used to diagnosing the ills of
recalcitrant hardware.

The 20GB Seagate is old but was never used - I got it when a storeroom
was cleaned out at work and nobody else wanted it. I bought the 120GB
Maxtor as a primary drive in June 2003 when I upgraded to XP.

I'm not having any line power problems that I know of - I don't have a
strip recorder, but I have metered the line voltage at several times
during the day and all the readings were right on. Additionally I
measured correct voltages on all the power leads under load so I am
assuming the computer's power supply is ok. The machine is on
monitored SPS with surge and a good battery and the SPS is not
complaining about anything. Also, if I were having power problems I
would expect to see symptoms from the system board, NIC and other
things which are a lot more finicky about clean power than hard disks.

I would believe sudden problems with one drive, but both at once is
too suspicious. After eliminating power and assuming both drives are
not likely to fail simultaneously without some external event like a
power surge, I'm left with software. The sounds started within
minutes of rebooting after the XP updates were installed. The sounds
the drives make are very like the sound of parking heads prior to spin
down - just much louder ... like the park is being interrupted by an
access.

I couldn't find the KB articles the last update supposedly addressed.
Do you know what the fixes were? Is it possible that something
undetected is wrong in the power save software or settings.

George
 
C

cimex

Have you considered using the System Restore function to roll back these
updates, as you are concerned about damage to your drives? Adding back the
updates singly, rebooting each time, would reveal whether any of the updates
is responsible for the strange disk behavior.
 
D

Dwayne

re:

I have two Dell 8200's here.. One is working fine with all the latest
patches, but the other is a different story..

On that one, my Seagate drive keeps crashing. Problem running CHKDSK on
Drive C:, I get a blue screen and a reboot when trying to load IE 6, to
errors in event viewer talking about the file system having a problem.

None of this was happening without these patches. I am talking about the
ones that were available for download on October 15th. One thing I have
noticed is... If I uninstall the Intel Application Accelerator everything
"appears" much better. Uninstalling the patches does not fix the problem,
because the damage is already done. and apparently pretty severe for an
uninstall and restore to not fix it.

As a matter of fact, I got the first blue screen and reboot right after the
patches were finished installing and the system rebooted. It never made it
back to the desktop until I did some things.

Very annoying as I my drive appears to be crashing and there is no logical
reason for it to be doing so.

HELP!

MS?
 
C

cimex

If your drive's hardware is failing, no logical reason is necessary! You may
want to take the drive to a repair shop for further evaluation.
 
D

Dwayne

re:

There is a logical reason necessary if said hardware was working fine just
prior to installing said patches, That is just common sense. Being a
professional computer technician since 1985 says that someone from Microsoft
needs to tell me why these patches are corrupting data and/or making ones
hard drive run out of it's normal parameters.
 
G

George Neuner

Have you considered using the System Restore function to roll back these
updates, as you are concerned about damage to your drives? Adding back the
updates singly, rebooting each time, would reveal whether any of the updates
is responsible for the strange disk behavior.
Click to expand...

I haven't had time to weed through everything and backup new stuff.
Although I haven't installed any new software and I back up critical
files regularly, I am in the middle of a project and there is a
considerable amount of downloaded research material which would be
inconvenient to lose and will take some time to back up.

George
 
G

George Neuner

I have two Dell 8200's here.. One is working fine with all the latest
patches, but the other is a different story..

On that one, my Seagate drive keeps crashing. Problem running CHKDSK on
Drive C:, I get a blue screen and a reboot when trying to load IE 6, to
errors in event viewer talking about the file system having a problem.

None of this was happening without these patches. I am talking about the
ones that were available for download on October 15th. One thing I have
noticed is... If I uninstall the Intel Application Accelerator everything
"appears" much better. Uninstalling the patches does not fix the problem,
because the damage is already done. and apparently pretty severe for an
uninstall and restore to not fix it.

As a matter of fact, I got the first blue screen and reboot right after the
patches were finished installing and the system rebooted. It never made it
back to the desktop until I did some things.

Very annoying as I my drive appears to be crashing and there is no logical
reason for it to be doing so.
Click to expand...

Interesting that you also have a Seagate drive. I wonder if that's
part of the problem.

George
 
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