>It was a rhythmic clicking...kind of like a heart beat. Probably two >clicks per second. It went on for about 30 seconds and then quit.
Does this happen when you start the computer? Does the drive still make this noise or any other noise? Can you hear if the drive is spinning up entirely. A healthy drive should spin up, then pause, and usually make a few clicks as it unparks the heads. It should then remain reasonably silent (no noises other than the hum of the drive sitting at speed), until you start to boot the computer. At that point you should hear the drive click as it reads data during the boot process. If it does this heartbeat click when the drive first comes up to speed, before you start booting, that isn't usually a very good sign. Usually that ends up meaning either a controller failure, a badly corrupted drive, or the head stepper motor is jamming. None of the above are good things. (I have also had drives that do that when they start up, and it means nothing... they just do it because they want to) >I tried Tech Tools. It was going through a read test and then hung at 96% >complete. The app wouldn't even respond after that. I didn't check it with >Apple Drive Setup yet. The fact that Tech Tools can see the drive exists, and tries to do anything with it is a good sign. That means there may be hope. At least the drive is healthy enough to attempt to operate. The fact that it hung part way thru a read test is NOT a good sign. That may mean there is a hardware failure occuring (bad sectors shouldn't have prevented Tech Tools from finishing the read test). If you have or can borrow Disk Warrior, I would try that. The goal at this point should be to get it up long enough to get off the files that you can't live without. In the event that you do get the drive up and mounted, I would immediatly back of anything of value (in order of its value to you). I would NOT trust the drive to continue running. This means be ready with some backup plan ready to go. Don't hope to get the drive up, and THEN shut down to install a 2nd drive or whatever to do your backup. Be ready to go. Anticipate that IF you get the drive up, you will have only a few minutes and a handful of read/write attempts before the drive fails again. And anticipate that any additional failures may render the drive totally dead. Once you have everything you need off the drive, then you are free to reformat and test the drive. If it formats successfully, and passes the testing, make your own decision as to if you want to trust the drive again. It may go back to working just fine. Or it may work for a few weeks/months and then fail again. If this is an IDE drive, consider the fact that you can get 40 gb drives for $30 these days. It may be better to replace the drive then to try to keep it. Of course, this could be a giant SCSI drive that will cost you a fortune to replace. I don't know your needs or financial status, so I can't tell you if you should replace the drive or not. -chris <http://www.mythtech.net> ___________________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe send a mail message with a SUBJECT line of "unsubscribe" to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
