One time only click of death?

[Legendary]

I woke up this morning to hear what sounded suspiciously like the clicking that occasionally plagued my nightmares of years past, but not exactly. It was more of a click, then multiple whirs, then 5 seconds later another click. Upon turning on my monitors and clicking FF, my computer froze. I turned it off and I tried to isolate the drive, but none of my HDs click anymore. In my Event Viewer I have:

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D.

I'm running a chkdsk d: /R to see if any data was corrupted, and the drive isn't making any noise from that. I guess my question is, can the click of death happen just once? Or was my experience not the click of death at all?
I appreciate anyone's experiences. For the record, this is a WD 120GB IDE drive, and I've had it for 5 flawlessly working years.

 

[drum]

Backup any pertinent data immediately, continue to use at your own risk.
i would be looking for a replacement if I were you.
Run some diagnostics on it to find out what exactly is going on

 

[Paperdoc]

My guess is the repeated click-whirrs was resets and re-read attempts. When the controller gets an error in the data read from the drive, it tells the drive to reset tiself and then try reading again. For the rare data mis-transmission this fixes everything right away and you'll never notice. But if there is a real problem the rest - re-read does not fix it, and it continues trying. So, there is a problem in reading data and sending it to the controller, or in the way the controller receives the data.

The error message you got on reboot says the controller has a problem. Maybe, of maybe elsewhere. There are a few simple things you can try. My favourinte is for when the cable connections just got loose or dirty. With the powr off and disconnected, at both ends of the data cable between HDD and controller, you just unplug anr re-connect a few times. Do it carefully so as not to damage cable or connector, and make sure you don't dislodge something nearby. But this often cleans the surfaces and re-establishes good connections, solving the problem. While you're at it, do the same with the power supply connector onto the HDD.

The next easy one is to pull the HDD and try it in another machine to see if the HDD itself has a problem. Similarly, if you can borrow another HDD from somewhere, plug it into your machine and see whether it works. That way you can check the controller. And don't forget, the ribbon cable itslef needs checning in similar fashion. Now you should know where the permanent problem is. That is, assuming the cable reconnecting thing did not solve it.

 

[drum]

Originally posted by: Paperdoc
My guess is the repeated click-whirrs was resets and re-read attempts. When the controller gets an error in the data read from the drive, it tells the drive to reset tiself and then try reading again. For the rare data mis-transmission this fixes everything right away and you'll never notice. But if there is a real problem the rest - re-read does not fix it, and it continues trying. So, there is a problem in reading data and sending it to the controller, or in the way the controller receives the data.

The error message you got on reboot says the controller has a problem. Maybe, of maybe elsewhere. There are a few simple things you can try. My favourinte is for when the cable connections just got loose or dirty. With the powr off and disconnected, at both ends of the data cable between HDD and controller, you just unplug anr re-connect a few times. Do it carefully so as not to damage cable or connector, and make sure you don't dislodge something nearby. But this often cleans the surfaces and re-establishes good connections, solving the problem. While you're at it, do the same with the power supply connector onto the HDD.

The next easy one is to pull the HDD and try it in another machine to see if the HDD itself has a problem. Similarly, if you can borrow another HDD from somewhere, plug it into your machine and see whether it works. That way you can check the controller. And don't forget, the ribbon cable itslef needs checning in similar fashion. Now you should know where the permanent problem is. That is, assuming the cable reconnecting thing did not solve it.

:thumbsup:
great thoughts

 

[Boyo]

I would run the WD diagnostics on the drive to see if it is about to die on you. Back up your data just in case.

 

[Legendary]

I ran WD diagnostics, it passed both tests, so I guess I'm in the clear.
Bit of a scary situation though.