Vista - Hard Drive making high pitched noises

After installing Vista RC1, I noticed my hard drive is making audible high
pitched noises. The pattern of the noise is 1 second steady beep-like noise,
then maybe .1 second silence. When I create disk activity, the noise alters
or disappears. I did not have this noise when running Windows XP. I have a
Dell Latitude D810 with a Pentium M 1.73 and 1 GB RAM.

It is possible that it isn't the hard drive making the noise, but seems like
the most likely culprit.

Any ideas?

I'd look for overheating, poor connectors (power, IDE or SATA cable).
Next, you can run a hard-drive 'health' tool form a CD or other media - most
hard-drive manufacturers have such tools on their websites and Dell might
have one as well.
Chkdsk and defrag might also help - the heads might be in a sort of loop
cause of corrupted or overly fragmented files or file table.
Some drives spin down on idle - this one might be trying.
If you have files that you need to backup/save, make sure you do that first.
Michael



"bjdku" <bjdku@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:9AB31511-DFF1-49B5-8BB7-BC2ED3F7BCC2@microsoft.com...
>
> After installing Vista RC1, I noticed my hard drive is making audible high
> pitched noises. The pattern of the noise is 1 second steady beep-like
> noise,
> then maybe .1 second silence. When I create disk activity, the noise
> alters
> or disappears. I did not have this noise when running Windows XP. I have
> a
> Dell Latitude D810 with a Pentium M 1.73 and 1 GB RAM.
>
> It is possible that it isn't the hard drive making the noise, but seems
> like
> the most likely culprit.
>
> Any ideas?

Thanks a bunch, these are great suggestions. I am thinking it may be an
overheating issue, because Vista is just working my laptop a lot harder than
XP did, but I am not certain. I will try each of your suggestions and post
back if I figure it out.


"Phillips" wrote:

> I'd look for overheating, poor connectors (power, IDE or SATA cable).
> Next, you can run a hard-drive 'health' tool form a CD or other media - most
> hard-drive manufacturers have such tools on their websites and Dell might
> have one as well.
> Chkdsk and defrag might also help - the heads might be in a sort of loop
> cause of corrupted or overly fragmented files or file table.
> Some drives spin down on idle - this one might be trying.
> If you have files that you need to backup/save, make sure you do that first.
> Michael
>
>
>
> "bjdku" <bjdku@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:9AB31511-DFF1-49B5-8BB7-BC2ED3F7BCC2@microsoft.com...
> >
> > After installing Vista RC1, I noticed my hard drive is making audible high
> > pitched noises. The pattern of the noise is 1 second steady beep-like
> > noise,
> > then maybe .1 second silence. When I create disk activity, the noise
> > alters
> > or disappears. I did not have this noise when running Windows XP. I have
> > a
> > Dell Latitude D810 with a Pentium M 1.73 and 1 GB RAM.
> >
> > It is possible that it isn't the hard drive making the noise, but seems
> > like
> > the most likely culprit.
> >
> > Any ideas?
>