So something is wrong with my desktop. I restarted it today and upon boot it began making a strange noise, the screen showed weird symbols and the boot wouldn't continue. For specifics: The computer starts, the single boot tone properly is heard and the 'boot screen' where the motherboard type is displayed shows properly. Upon going to the next screen, which is the standard screen with a bunch of fast rolling text and memory checks, etc, the computer starts making a rapid fire 'clicking' noise, kind of like tk tk tk tk tk tk tk tk, then flips off that post screen to another blank screen that just has a "^N" written on it and freezes. No clue what the hell is going on. I paused during the post part of boot to see what the text said, but didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Anyone have an ideas on wtf is the problem?
Sounds like hard drive failure, if you hear a clicking sound like that. Basically means your HDD is probably dead.
It doesn't sound like its coming from the harddrive, its from the internal speaker... not the standard hard drive failure type noise, but I coudl be mistaken I guess.
You can probably take the HDD out of the case and put it against your ear, then hear if the noise is coming from it. If it is, it's probably toast. If you're going to try to recover data from the HDD, you'll most likely not want to start it too many times, as there is a good chance it is getting progressively worse. I have rescued data from clicking hdd's. The freezer trick has worked for me before. For the uninitiated, put the HDD in the freezer for several hours to let it get cold, then hook it up to a waiting hot swap port and run copy. I always wrap the HDD in a paper towel and put it in a ziplock bag. I once kludged together extension power and a long IDE cable and did the copy while the HDD stayed in the freezer. My success rate has been about one in three. In my experience, Seagate HDD's have been so bad that I refuse to buy them any more. I've never had a seagate 3.5 inch drive in an enclosure last more than 1.5 years. I've had very, very few failures with Western Digitals. So few, in fact, that for spinning platters, all I buy now are WD Baviar Black drives, though I might get a red. For laptops, and system drives in the desktops I administer, it's SSD all the way. With Backups. There are several linux utilities that will do a full disk copy. DDrescue comes in 2 separate flavors. One of them will do a sector by sector copy of the hdd, including the errors, then will go back and retry as many times as you like to grab a good picture of the bad sectors. OS doesn't matter, as it's block level. Professional HDD rescue services exist, but the cheapest start in the several hundered dollar range and go way, way up. Just remember, there is no reason to rush this, at least hardware wise. The data won't change appreciably while the hdd sits on the shelf while you do your disk rescue homework. The clock is only ticking when the drive is powered up. Good luck.
Yea don't really care about teh data, its backed up. I did try just unplugging the harddrive completely to see if at least the error type or the sound would change, it didn't, so I'm leaning toward not harddrive.... I also pulled both memory slots on by one and the issue didn't change, so I'm assuming at this point its either mobo (which i find slightly unlikely since the computer boots up with the mobo welcome screen), graphics card (which coudl be as it fails right before windows is supposed to boot), or perhaps PSU
Thinking mobo and processor are OK as I can load BIOS just fine and mess around with it without issues... it really freaks out when its about to load windows, and the graphics are messed up, so either the graphics card has gone haywire or the PS isn't able to supply the proper load at that point, but can for the mobo boot up. Hmm.....
I was also leaning towards the PS. Seeing as most modern PSs have at least a dual 12V rails you could refer to your PS manual and see if you have the option to either select another 12V cable (or contact if modular) and move your graphics card to another power rail and hope that the fault is far enough down the transformation line that you have at least one fully stable 12V output. Of course it also comes down to how much watt overhead and total amperage you have available on the PS to begin with. Here is a good link for PS calculation that can give you a hint in conjunction with your PS tech specs. Just a Q, can you break post and enter BIOS setup?
Good one Myrsky, had my phone plugged in one day and it took me a good hour to figure out why my computer would not boot. Though it doesn't explain the weird noises Tuo is getting.
Well, this happened like a month ago, I did fix it fairly soon after hte issue. As recap, the issue was my keyboard, I unplugged it and it worked fine. Go figure.
