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Dell 4700 watch spring problem

E

Estam

Member
Ha! Well that's what it sounds like, a watch spring "unraveling. My brother asked me to re-format and install xp sp2 in his Dell Dimension 4700 which seems like a nice computer. I have only installed Firefox so far and my problem is that when idle (and only when idle) every few minutes the hard drive sounds like a watch spring running unraveling, not a loud but enough when I'm doing something else is annoying.

Runs for approx 15 to 20 seconds and stops waits couple of mins and does it again. When booting Firefox for example the hard drive makes regular chunking sounds as my other computers but the, as I call it the watch spring sound is much less loud. The only thing I've tried is running Process Explorer and shows nothing when this starts. Any suggestions please.
 
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Just as an up-date I set to have the monitor turn off in 2 mins and the hard drive in 3 mins and the monitor shuts off fine and the hard drive will eventually shut off but will fire up within few minutes and starts doing it's unraveling sounds again.

It seems to be a busy hard drive. Thanks for any help.
 
If you didn't toast the diag partition you can hit F12 during boot and select diagnostics to test the HDD.
 
Oh Boy, thought someone might ask that! 🙂
Seems like my hd has two sounds, the Chunking sound that it does when say booting up a program then there is a softer tone that sounds like a whirring sound that it makes when say updating a file. This is like the soft whirring sound that goes on for approx 30 to 45 seconds and maybe does this every few minutes. It doesn't do this when I'm using the computer for browsing or typing text in Word, does it only when the computer is idle.
 
Estam said:
Oh Boy, thought someone might ask that! 🙂
Seems like my hd has two sounds, the Chunking sound that it does when say booting up a program then there is a softer tone that sounds like a whirring sound that it makes when say updating a file. This is like the soft whirring sound that goes on for approx 30 to 45 seconds and maybe does this every few minutes. It doesn't do this when I'm using the computer for browsing or typing text in Word, does it only when the computer is idle.
Click to expand...

So it makes the sound while the drive is actively in use? I was going to guess that you were hearing the motor spin up and down, but that shouldn't happen while the drive is in use. Maybe you're hearing a bearing in the motor rattle?

At any rate, there's not much you can do about a hard drive making weird sounds except to stop using the HDD (i.e. replace it).
 
Your "soft whirring sound" is something I would associate with the hard drive being a little loose in the case.

Have you opened the case yet? Some (if not all) of those mount the hard drive parallel to the front panel, so you may want to make sure the screws holding it up are secure.

My general rule on a hard drive is that if it isn't a clicking or crashing noise, you are probably fine.
 
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