Well,i have a problem haha,my sister owns a Sony Vaio laptop (not sure the model,its a white 15inch) and the hard drive has started ticking.I want to know if anyone can advise me what the problem is,if i can fix it.or what it may cost to have someone else fix it.If its too expensive to fix i will just take the loss because the screen is broken anyway and i have been using it as a secondary connected to my TV.
Thanks in advance for any help.
That indicates the hard drive is starting to fail. Better back up everything on it and get a new one.
Drives dead baby, drives dead.
Backup everything immediately
I cant backup anything as the computer will not boot,and because it won't boot i cant see whats on the screen as it won't display on the TV until it boots.Are you all 100% sure there is not fixing it?
OK, that confirms that the drive is dead, so everything on that drive is lost.
Alright,thanks anyways,bright side is,i can take her RAM and put in my computer haha.
If there is anything important you could try putting the disk in a desktop - maybe you can recover something. If the drive is not recognized try cooling it down (with some stuff from the freezer), just wrap the drive in something water proof ;) - thats really extreme and probably wont work for you but thats how I got one bad disk to cooperate enough to copy important files a few years ago.
Well the only important stuff on there was some pictures,but those were already printed,so i don't think im gonna go to any extremes to get it to work,and besides,i know its not a heat issue because it started doing this after the computer had not been turned on for like 3 days.Anyways thanks for the help guys.
It's not a question of whether or not it's a heat issue. It's just a known quirk with hard drives that sometimes you can put them in the freezer for a while after they've failed, and sometimes that will allow you to pull information off of them that you otherwise wouldn't be able to. I don't know why it works sometimes, but it does.
The clicking you're hearing is the read head crashing into the platters that the information is stored on. This will scratch the platters and corrupt data, thus causing the drive to fail. Any time you hear that clicking sound coming from a hard drive, you're going to want to back up all data ASAP and load it to a new hard drive.
Nothing is crashing into the platters - that is impossible as long as they are spinning. Head is separated and suspended by a thin layer of fast moving air created by the spin. What you hear is most likely head getting lost and going back to a park position.
it might have tourette's syndrome lol. sorry to hear it failed before you could get all the data off of it to another drive 1st, that always sucks :(
If it's started to click, it's only a matter of time before it dies. Check the serial number if it's still under warranty.