Hi folks.

My computer hangs while booting after making weird clicking noises. These noises come from the WD HD. I have a maxtor 40 GB and a WD 30 GB HD. I have a dell Dim 4400. OS is win XP pro. It has been going on ever since I got the HD 3-4 yrs ago. I have had Win 2k, XP home and XP pro OSs with the same problems.

While booting, you get that XP screen with a scrolling bar at the bottom. While this bar is scrolling, the WD hard disk makes repeated noises like this: tut tada trrrrrrrrrr followed by a 1-2 sec pause, tut tada trrrrrrrrrr followed by a 1-2 sec pause, tut tada trrrrrrrrrr followed by a 1-2 sec pause....
Finally the comp just hangs. I have to do a hard boot. To fix this problem temporarily, I have to start in Safe mode. In safe mode, the OS loads correctly. I hear the "tut tada trrrrrrrrrr followed by a 1-2 sec pause" noise only once. After booting in safe mode, I can shutdown and restart the comp (soft restart) properly.

Because of this problem, I cannot power off my comp completely. It is such a pain to start in Safe mode first, and then the regular mode.

Any idea what in the sam hill is going on?

Thanks
AEN

Sounds like the hard drive may be failing. I suggest you boot off your Drivers and Utilities CD and run the Dell Diagnostics.

It sounds like your hard drive is going bad, and that it is having particular problems with a particular section of your boot sector. Before you do anything else, I highly advise you to back up anything you want to save!

Back up whatever files are important before you can't access the HD permanently

yes, i agree with everyone else.

also, did you ever report this problem to wd when you first started hearing the problems?

if it was 3-4 yrs ago and you did not, then most likely the warranty is dead. but if you have some email correspondance where they claim that the hard drive is 'fine' then you may be able to get them to replace it....it's iffy though.