I had exactly the same problem about 4 months ago. The WD diagnostics said
it was a damaged IDE cable.

Sceptically I replaced it, and lo and behold, no more clicking.

Although we are backing evrything up to CD and made sure SMART was turned on

the_gnome


"David Maynard" wrote in message
...
Jenny wrote:

How do I run the WD diagnostics??

If you don't have the disk go to the western digital site and download
their 'lifeguard' disk.

I think you are right about temperature. I put in a new one and
it already seems hotter than usual. This is in a dell 4100 and they
mount the drive vertically against the front. I don't see a way to
mount a fan but there is certainly space and it seems to need one.
Thanks,

That seems to be a popular mounting style these days. I just worked on an
HP machine that was the same way. Had a dead western digital hard drive
too, and guess what the symptom was: click, click, click, click, click.



"David Maynard" wrote in message
... That sounds like the symptom
referred to, descriptively enough, as the

'click of death' and if it follows the pattern of my WD drives the best

you

can do is administer pain management; which you've done by buying a
replacement and backing up your data.

Next is to run the WD diagnostics to get the error code, or wait till
complete failure if it passes for the short term, and get a warranty
replacement.

In the mean time I'd check case temps because it may be you have a hot

spot

around the hard drive that's causing premature failure.




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