(no subject)

[chaobell]

Today a fairly old Gateway box came in for a dead power supply. It was one of those lovely proprietary jobs, and the box was old enough that Gateway no longer carried the part. The very nice man at Gateway gave me the number for people who did carry it, but before I went to the trouble of ordering the thing, I figured I'd better make sure the power supply didn't take anything to the Great Beyond with it.

While a standard ATX power supply would not physically fit in the case (and I planned on offering a transplant of guts into a new case as an option, because boy, that was one pricey power supply), it would power the beast just fine. So I plugged it in, popped Troubleshooter into the A: drive, and fired it up.

For a few seconds, all seemed well. Lights, fans, Gateway logo appeared on screen... and then the box made this horrible Godawful screeching noise. How horrible? Imagine raking your fingernails across a blackboard. Mix in the sound of chipmunks being stretched to death on the rack. Crank it up to about 110db.

Having never heard a computer make that sort of noise, I had no idea where it was coming from, but it happened once during POST and once afterward. Jesus, was that the A: drive? Reset, watched box. No, it didn't happen when POST poked on the A: drive. Maybe it was something weird coming out of the speaker. Reset, put finger on speaker. No vibration. Put finger on modem speaker. No vibration. Put finger on hard drive.

Ah, there it was. Shutting down, disconnecting the drive, and rebooting confirmed it. The other tech and I looked at each other something like this: @_@.

Folks, I have never heard a hard drive make a noise like that in my entire life. I've heard ka-CLUNK ka-CLUNK. I've heard tik-tik-tik-tik-tik. I've heard wheeeezeCLUNK wheeeeezeCLUNK. I have never ever heard a hard drive SCREAM IN AGONY before.

Just for shits and giggles, and to see how dead this drive really was, I shut down again, reconnected the drive, let Troubleshooter start up, and told it to run the hard drive diagnostics.

"What hard drive? I don't see no hard drive," said Troubleshooter.

Called customer to deliver the bad news about the drive. The kicker:

"Oh, yeah, it's been doing that for a while now. I was hoping you could get some stuff off it..."

Passed along the phone number to a local data recovery service, because that kind of shit is waaaaay out of our league.

He already had a new computer, and didn't particularly care about this one beyond getting the shit off his drive, so he thanked us for our time and asked us to put it back together so he could take it home and give it a decent burial.

It's too bad he needed the drive back. I really wanted to dissect it to see what the hell could have possibly made a noise like that.

Comments

[the-goth-pixie.livejournal.com]

The noise was most likely the heads scrapping across platters that no longer spin. For a fingernails on a chalkboard effect.

[axessdenyd.livejournal.com]

I had one do the opposite at work.

Came in after a night of hard drive diagnostics and we could hear the platter scraping on the heads... I meant to open it up and see how big the scratches were, but we ended up being too busy.

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

I love it when they bring in drives that are beyond dead and admit "oh yeah, it's been making noises for awhile." I really wish I could have heard the scream, though. XD

[twitchfetish.livejournal.com]

i've heard that from a drive

unfortunately it was mine.

i think the actuator and the bearings go so fucked the drive head actually hits the platters, but unfortunately the elex are too fucked to detect it so you just get needle+glass+high rotation speed=bleeding eardrums and neighbours calling the cops to report kitty rape...

IV

[das-prompt.livejournal.com]

mmmmmm....kitty rape.

[tsutton.livejournal.com]

That made me lol'ed

Re: who cares about those realistic reasons above!

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

Oh gods... I had a customer once that called in with a no power/no post system. Power drained it (mostly to check for stupid customer mistakes), no luck. Nothing's coming up, it's dead. Have them open it up. It is quite literally infested with cockroaches according to the customer. She had to ask what she should do.

Answer: call an exterminator. Our repair facility would reject the system and probably dispose of it, and so would most shipping carriers. Getting the exterminator just in general might not be bad for her house.

Toasty, toasty flames

[thebutler.livejournal.com]

I've always seemed to have bad luck with flammable computing equipment, but I don't think I've managed to toast a moth yet.

I've had an IO card go up in flames, two power supplies go boom with added smoke, one of which burnt out a motherboard in the process. I've had a CD-ROM drive spontaneously combust, and a graphics card which tried to fry itself, but crashed the system before it got that far. It did manage to begin to melt its fan, though, which I thought was impressive.

That's all store-bought hardware - the stuff I've built myself for uni has also made a habit of cooking, to the point where my lab partner claimed to be able to tell the difference between the odour of fried MOSFET and baked resistor. I had to wait for visible smoke (or do a finger test) to see what part was trying to self-sacrifice this time...

(And yes, I'm fairly sure that it was the graphics card overheating beyond the fan's capacity, which then killed the fan, not the other way around, as the replacement fan died in short order and in exactly the same way.)

Re: who cares about those realistic reasons above!

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

Yerg.

One of our network folks (who actually trained me on my job and was a tech for a time) told me about the time she went to go check out a computer out in the shop that wouldn't boot up. A mouse ran out. She slammed it shut and went 'Um.... clean that out then bring it to my office. I am NOT carrying it myself!'

[110billion.livejournal.com]

My FDD did the same thing.
It's now sitting in my bin.

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

I came home one day to that exact noise. HDD heads in the 2GB in my router/firewall were doing the fandango on the platters.

[japester.livejournal.com]

it's either the bearings scratching themselves, or the heads on the platters.
I've heard bearing go in all sorts of things, cars, outboard motors .... hard drives. They all make bad bad nasty screaching noises.

[pleaseremove.livejournal.com]

well, one of my drives made a noise like that, but it sounds a bit different. when mine died it really died...it turned out one of the platters had a fault in the form of the hairline variety, and so is shattered, and left a big dent in the case....ah well, thank god for backups