Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Strange hard disk noises.....

<Read on, you'll see why this topic is in the lounge>

We've had about eight inches of snow here and blizzard winds. The only extent to which this gave me the heebiejeebies was that we also had five power cuts. This meant that my trusty G4 which I had deliberately left ON due to start-up problems, was perforce switched OFF. (see posts passim)

I had no choice but to switch it back ON today. <gibber> As it came up, I could hear VERY SCARY INDEED rhythmic scraping noises.

OMGAAAAAAHHHHHHD this hard drive is in a bad way! <massive gibbering>

I waited patiently to see what the Mac would do. I had no choice.

My Trusty G4 is positioned in a corner against an outside wall. The other side of this wall is the neighbouring property's driveway.

Unbeknownst to me, the neighbour was outside, at that precise time, scraping snow off ice off snow on his driveway, with a regular rhythm to his shovel...............

Trusty G4 booted OK apart from complaining about the power cut, which is normal for it. Phew!

haha! great story!

Your neighbour was, of course, just doing a surface scan of his drive - part of his preventive maintenance program.

ryck

I have to admit, that story made me smile

I had a similar experience a couple of weeks ago with my G4. I started hearing a weird kind of tapping. (I'm up on the second floor, right by a window.) My hard drive's only about a year old, so I figured something else was failing. It was an on-and-off but rhythmic kind of noise, and I couldn't tell where it was coming from. As I'm crawling around on the floor, trying to locate it, it started getting louder and faster. I looked up, through the window, and saw a squirrel trying to gnaw its way through an electrical wire that attached to the building by my window.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean that you're not being followed.
By the same token, just because you've identified noises extraneous to your hard drive, doesn't mean that it's not going to fail.
But then, you all know that ...