On Sep 13, 2010, at 4:46 AM, LuKreme wrote:
> I noticed as I was copying that the clicking noises coincided with a complete
> stop of all disk I/O, lasting from a couple of seconds up to a minute. Once
> the clicking stopped, operations resumed as normal.
> Shortly after getting everything copied off (and at this point the drive was
> almost completely empty) the system could not read the drive on boot.
>
> I figured the drive had finally died completely, but decided to reformat it
> anyway.
>
> The reformat went fine and the drive isn't clicking. I've started to dump a
> bunch of files onto it, and still no clicking. I'm up to about 400GB copied.
> (I am not MOVING anything to this drive, just copying).
>
> However, I am still paranoid that there's something wrong with the drive.
Was the ticking noise intermittent or periodic?
There are two classes of periodic ticking noise. One (faster) indicates
insufficient power to the drive, and when you hear it, the drive won't respond
at all. The other (slower) is an attempt to read from a bad block and is
accompanied by a temporary cessation of disk transfer (and usually hangs the
CPU). Bad blocks can be finessed by a format-and-write-zeroes operation, which
causes the disk hardware to recognize the bad block and permanently map its
address to a working spare block. Perhaps this is what you did, which is why
the disk operates now. But whatever caused those earlier blocks to go bad may
be waiting in the wings to make more blocks go bad in the future. Or your bad
blocks may have been one-time anomalies. It's a crapshoot as to how much trust
you put in the drive at this point. Drive Genius or Speed Tools Utilities can
scan the drive (before you reformat it) and report on the extent of the bad
block regions, which can give you an indication of how extensive the damage is
before you decide whether it is worth remapping and continuing.
--
Macs R We -- Personal Macintosh Service and Support
in the Wickenburg and far Northwest Valley Areas.
http://macsrwe.com
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