Clicking noises from 4month old HD

[mikefitz]

I have a four month old eMachine computer, with a 120GB, WD 1200AB hard drive and an AMD Athlon XP 2800+. My OS is XP Home Edition.

Came to work a couple days ago, my monitor was black except for a message that said something about the drive being unbootable (I wrote done the error massage, then lost the paper).

I couldn't ctrl+alt+del, or turn off the power with the switch, I had to pull the plug.

When I tried to restart it, I could here loud clicking noises coming from the HD, and had to turn it off by pulling the plug again. I couldn't start it in safe mode, and when I tried to start it with the XP disk, I got a message that said windows woudl re-install, and all data would be erased (can't do that except as very alst resort)

I spoke with eMachines, they said the HD most likely has a mechanical problem, and sent a new HD. I investigated elsewhere, and got the same opinion. I was told to install the new drive as master, and old drive as slave, and see fi I could recover some info.

I arranged the jumpers and tried that, but machine would not boot. I looked at the WD web site, it said that if my machine is cable serial capable, both drives should be jumpered as such.

I jumpered both drives as CS, and startup would get to the XP loading window, but would not complete loading.

The WD site also suggested that I try hooking the power cables, but not the IDE cable to the slave (damaged) drive, start it, and see if the clicking stopped. I tried that, and the clicking stopped. WD says that may indicate a virus problem.

One other thing. Bios will read the new drive correctly. Bios sees the old drive, but only as a 8455 MB drive.

Any comments? Do you all think I'll have to send the old drive to a clean room for data recovery?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Foggy]

Did you D/L and run the WD utilities disk????????????

[Bovon]

Most times a clicking sound coming from a hard drive is the read/write heads bouncing around inside trying to find the proper track with the MBR data. Also, most hard drives that are failing and click..will continue to click when only powered up and no ribbon cable attached. The fact that your BIOS is not recognizing the old drive at its proper 120 gb size. indicates an electronics failure on the drives mainboard. The drive MUST be recognized at the very same byte size as when it was originally formatted and setup..or the MBR will never be found...that may be why yours is clicking around inside...the heads are trying to locate the MBR so that it will boot.

[mikefitz]

Foggy - No, I did not, but will right now. I appreciate your help.
bovon - Thanks a lot for the input, I have somethng else to go on. Is it possible I have a MBR virus?

[whitebeard21]

Would it be possible to copy the fat from the new hd to the old since they are both the same size hd with the same hardware? This is not a sugestion but a question.