Yes you should be concerned and do something about it. Are you sure its the hard drive? If you are then get it backed up to something very quickly or you could lose all your files from it.
But it could be a fan or a lot of other things. You could trouble shoot by removing power connectors to all the drives for a start.
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three things make noises on PCS
Fans, hard drives and Removeable media (floppies/cds/dvds)
It could be the hard drive, in which case worry. Its more likely to be the fan, in which case dont worry.
fault finding?
1/ unplug or block fan blades and turn on, if no noise you found your culprit The fan in the power supply cant be unplgged but block it with a cotton bud or something. you could have one fan on cpu (dont block that for too long your cpu will vapourise) and one on video card (ditto re vapourising)
to
2/ unplug power lead to removeable drive and check
3/ Unplug power lead to hard drive
If three causes the noise to go - Panic now, start backing up vital data.
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"Its more likely to be the fan, in which case dont worry."
However, if this is the case and it stops making the noise sometime in the future, worry! :-) Cos the fan will have given up...
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It's not a Mesh by any chance is it - I've had two and both have had fan noise problems? I've tended to ignore it, but the newer one started making a different odd noise last night so I will have to investigate.
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Thank you for those responses.
Mike H - yes it is a Mesh.
With regards to backup, can anyone point to "An Idiots guide to Backup" please?
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... With regards to backup, can anyone point to "An Idiots guide to Backup" please? .. >>
No doubt rtj70 will tell you off for not starting a separate Q.
backups for dummies
www.pcguide.com/care/bu/whatFull-c.html
backups wiki entry:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_backup
backups by a vendor:
www.acronis.com/resource/solutions/backup/2005/inc...l
backups for nerds:
www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
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If you can get into the computer's BIOS settings (push DEL when you turn it on, usually), then there might be an option to set a warning if a fan fails or the CPU overheats. It's not subtle - when it goes off you get a loud beeping sound from the PC.
If it's just a case fun, unplug it and don't worry. Can't think of a situation where one of our PCs has got that hot inside that it needed additional forced ventilation.
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I would read up on the suggestions on backup above by jbif. Having backups is always a good idea.
Even if you work out it's a fan and not a hard drive I'd still look at doing backups.
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I would read up on the suggestions on backup above by jbif. .. >>
But if you find that heavy going, just go and buy something like Seagate Freeagent or Maxtor Onetouch external drive storage, costs about £40 to £60* depending on where you buy it.
media.seagate.com/center/onetouch/
which will do it all for you with one touch of a button.
*£50 +p&p for 250GB here
www.eclipsecomputers.com/product.aspx?code=HES-250...0
[not necessarily a recommendation to buy from them].
"Computers come and go, but your content should always be nearby. With up to 750 glorious gigabytes, the FreeAgent external hard drive is the best place to gather and access all of your important photos, movies, music, games and documents. Simply plug in the power and the USB cable and you?re ready to go.
Designed to live peacefully in your home or office, the FreeAgent external hard drive is extra quiet and takes up less room on your desk than a stapler. Even the cable ports are base-mounted to help keep your desk free of clutter. We even add a little bit of sophistication to your desktop with the unique espresso brown finish and molten amber illumination. To eliminate the slightest bit of worry, we?ve even included technical support and a five-year limited warranty."
Edited by jbif on 20/01/2009 at 20:27
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backups for dummies
www.pcguide.com/care/bu/whatFull-c.html
Not dummy enough for this dummy, I am afraid.
It seemed logical to me to make a full backup onto DVDs and the in future make backups of thise file that had changed since the last backup.
So, I put a DVD on the E:/ drive, started the "Backup and Recovery Wizaed" (or some such name) and immediately got the message:-
"The backup file name could not be used
E:/backup.bkf
Please ensure that it is a valid path and that you have sufficient access"
What am I doing wrong? Incidentally it seems to me as as the PC came with XP etc pre-installed and without installation discs, that I need to backup the operating system.
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>>It seemed logical to me to make a full backup onto DVDs and then in future make backups of those file that had changed since the last backup.>>
Hard work and will need a lot of disks, depending on how much data you have to backup; for safety you would also need at least a copy of each DVD backup.
The external drives mentioned earlier will do exactly as you require and carry out incremental backups as frequently as you wish.
I have a Seagate One Touch 400GB external hard drive and backups are just a press of a button - if U wished to restore any or all of the files it's equally simple to undertake.
The external drive itself cost £53 about a year ago; these days they are/can be even cheaper and have much higher capacities.
Backing up the operating system as well can be achieved by cloning the hard drive on to the external drive separately.
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The external drive itself cost £53 about a year ago; these days they are/can be even cheaper and have much higher capacities.
Iomega 500GB for 50 quid at Comet 'collect in store' :-
www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/371335/IOMEGA-50...E
Backing up the operating system as well can be achieved by cloning the hard drive on to the external drive separately.
Agreed, if the HDD is on the way out I'd clone it, saves mesing around with install disks. I did this at xmas on my laptop using acronis trueimage, the 15 day free trial was more than enough to clone the 1 drive; took about half an hour to clone 25 GB.
www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/
Edited by SpamCan61 {P} on 21/01/2009 at 09:58
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Perhaps even more remarkable value for an external hard drive(!):
tinyurl.com/9zwso9
Over the years I'd always paid around £65 for an internal hard drive ranging, in order, from 1.7, 6.4, 20 and then 60GB capacity.
My latest internal HDD, acquired about a year ago, is 320GB and cost £47 - today such capacity drives are around £10-15 cheaper.
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I think Tesco have a 1TB drive in store for 70 quid come to think of it.
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. seems to me as as the PC came with XP etc pre-installed .. >>
Go to Mesh support forum and they will send you a Disk or tell you how to make one.
.. Not dummy enough for this dummy, I am afraid. >>
You did not tell us you were asking about the XP built in backup routine.
www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_backup.htm
.. "Backup and Recovery Wizaed" (or some such name) and immediately got the message:- "The backup file name could not be used E:/backup.bkf ...>>
See
www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=backup+file+name+c...=
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I have now purchased and installed a Seagate FreeAgent 750gb external hard drive, £78 from Tesco. Up and running and first backup done.
Everything seems to be ok, thank you all for your advice and comments.
Now - can I, should I, back up the operating system? Because I can't see how to do that.
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Spamcan and others mention cloning your disk further up this thread. Cloning will create an image of the entire hard drive. Acronis is suggested as a tool for doing that (Spamcan gives the link and says that there is a free 15 day trial version - presumably the fact that the 15 days has run out if you ever need to restore the disk will not matter)
Anyway, this is essentially a once-off operation - you cannot "maintain" a disk image by adding files later. So you would carry out this imaging process (probably to DVD), then regularly backup My Documents etc to your new disk. In the event of a catastrophic problem requiring recovery, you would restore the Acronis image, which would put the computer back to the point of when you took the image, then restore you backup to recover your latest Document library etc.
If you have a large My Documents (e.g. lots of photos) you could speed up the imaging process (and use less DVDs) by backing up Documents etc first, checking that the backup is complete and can be read, then delete the backed up libraries from your C Drive prior to taking the image, restoring them afterwards. But do be sure that your backup is good before doing this...
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An update on my post above.
When I turned my PC on today, there was no grinding noise, but the system locked up before ir had opened properly.
The usual half a dozen lines that start off something like American Megatrends was replaced by a page full of text, no warning messages, so far as I could see. The only way to get out of it was to turn off the power. While the power was off, I removed the USB lead from the external hard drive and then switched on again.
The PC worked normally this time. Any ideas what might be causing the lock-up?
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You need to check the fan and heatsink on your CPU (blocked or stopped) and the fan on the graphics card if you have one.
If you dont know what a cpu fan looks like or where it is, let us know.
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>>...but the system locked up before it had opened properly.>>
It could be that your computer was trying to bootup from the external hard drive and removing the USB lead allowed it to bootup as normal.
I would only turn the external hard drive when needed and afterwards use the Safely Remove Hardware icon to close it down.
American Megatrends Inc (AMI) produces the Bios software for your system's motherboard.
Edited by Stuartli on 22/01/2009 at 14:42
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