[ltp] Harddrive Clicking

[Sebastian Geiger]

Dear all,

after having written that I exchanged my build in 120GB Hitachi drive
for a 320GB Seagate (ST9320421AS) drive last week, I now find, that I
hear a strange clicking sound some times. Being on Windows this is
almost all the time the case, while being on Linux it is only from time
to time. I belive the sound comes from the head loading and parking,
since the sound is more like two rapid clicks, rather than one. Having
read the following article:
"http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking" I still
have no solution.

I tried all of the commands, with the result, that the 193 load cycle
count increased over night from 1400 to 2500 and the laptop would wake
up from suspend immediately after successfully suspending. A reboot fix
that, since these commands are not permanent. Various hard drive checks,
including the SeaTools Dos version (boot cd) and the bios build in hdd
diagnosis programm confirmed that the drive is ok. I also tried running
MHDD (a dos programm) but it can not access the drive. In AHCI mode it
will say drive busy (not ready or something like that). Once I also got
that the drive is ATA Password protectet, also I have not set a
password. In Compatibility mode MHDD would just freeze and not respond.
SeaTools reported that the drive was "Security Freeze Locked" which
means that no Password can be set on the drive afaik.

I tried using hdparm -B ... /dev/sda with the numbers 255, 254 and 128
having no success what so ever, except that it breaks suspend to ram.
Besides the clicking being very annoying I am worried that I will
decrease my hard drive life time. Does anyone have experienced similar
things with their hard drive?

Best Regards
Sebastian