Click of death?

Backstory:
Had computer in sleep mode, opened it up, everything freezes. Can't shut down in any other way than holding down power button.
When I turned it back on I got the flashing file folder, but it never reached the apple symbol. I inserted the disk to boot from, did the repair disk/repair permissions and the computer worked fine again for a while (approx. 1/2 an hour). Suddenly while opening safari it froze again.
Now every time it turns on it makes a clicking sound like it is turning over something inside (hard drive issue?) and it will either freeze on the file folder symbol, or freeze during the repair disk function. I have tried it numerous times and it freezes EVERY TIME now.
Any suggestions on what to do from here? Do I just need to get a new HD? I have very little saved on my computer, and am not worried about losing data, I just want everything to work ok again! Thanks!
ibook G4 14" Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Hi andrea-g
Yes the clicking sound suggests hard drive failure is occurring.
Here are some possible replacement drives if you want to do it yourself.
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/2.5-Notebook/
regards roam

Similar Messages

4G CLICK OF DEATH

I've had 3 replacements for a 4G iPod since December 2004.
I used to think my first 4G iPod failed because I took it running with me and a few weeks later after having had no problems, suddenly the iPod hard disk begins to spin up, starts making that "all-so-familiar-now" clicking noise. After resets and failed attempts to restore the iPod software on the Mac, I'd give up and send it back.
I thought I took alot better care of the second iPod, never took it running, never dropped it. Only stayed in the car and with me at work. Never shook it up so as to cause any severe problem. After a few months went by, lo and behold it suddenly started the clicking again. And so, it went back... again.
Eventually my current and third iPod has finally succumbed to the evil click of death. Only this time, my iPod is out of warranty and I can't send it back for a free replacement.
I read an article online some months ago that mentioned this click of death is rampant for 4G iPods. The author of the article claimed he thought the click of death was the cable connecting the circuitry to the hard disk can come loose from time to time. By simply opening the iPod and making sure the cable with the pins is properly connected to the hard disk he suddenly had a working iPod again.
I tried this same procedure, figuring it was out of warranty anyway so there's nothing to lose, and magically it worked. It didn't look as if anything had come loose from the hard disk though on mine. I pressed my finger against the ribbon connected to the hard disk, closed the iPod, and turned it on again. The click of death was gone. I plugged it to the Mac, ran the iPod updater and a had a working iPod again!
But for some reason this is only a temporary solution. Every so often, something weird would happen. Maybe the iPod would lock up, sometimes it might skip between songs, sometimes it acted really slow. Occasionally I could make it work fine again by forcing it to reset. Other times, I'd get the sad iPod icon or the folder icon. When this occurred, I'd whip out my pocket knife (I got good at doing this in a matter of seconds) open the iPod, press against the ribbon, close the iPod. BEHOLD it worked again! It would go maybe another few weeks with no problems syncing or copying music.
Until one day.... I was skipping through songs in the car, and it crashed hard on this one song. I've played the song many times without problem. Now all it does is show the Apple logo for a few seconds, spin up, click click, off, restarts, shows the Apple logo... repeat. It responds to no manual commands. Computer won't even recognize it because the iPod doesn't ever boot, it's stuck in loop of crashing and restarting, I couldn't even turn it off.
Left me no choice but to open it up again, and disconnect the hard disk while it was on. That stopped the restarts. The iPod software is still OK, but it won't recognize the disk. If I reconnect the disk, it starts the restart cycle over and over. It's officially out cold now. I suspect the hard disk is to blame. I also believe the same problem plagued my previous iPod replacements, I'd just never analyzed it, rather sent it back to Apple and they'd of course give me a brand new one.
All I got to say is... it's ridiculous the amount of 4G iPod click of death problems I hear about. Apple should have sent me a brand new nano or 5G long ago to replace what I believe they would have known was so obvious of a widespread problem in their 4G iPods. Maybe the recent updater is to blame, but I don't know. After 3 iPods and out of luck on warranties, can anyone fill me in more about the iPod hard disk? Is it the same as any mini hard disk standard to all laptops?
PowerMac G4 (Sawtooth) Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Have you tried this before
For Mac computer
1. Open the disk utility, hope your iPod appears there (left hand side), highlight it
2. Go to Tab “Partition”, click either “Delete” or “Partition”, if fails, skip this step and go to 3
3. Go to Tab “Erase” , choose Volume Format as “MAC OS Extended (Journaled), and click Erase, again if fails, skip it and go to 4
4. Same as step 3, but open the “Security Options....” and choose “Zero Out Data” before click Erase. It will take 1 to 2 hours to complete.
5. Eject your iPod and do a Reset
6. Open the iPod Updater and click “Restore”

G4 Minis and the click of death?

I came home today to a dead network and the dulcet sounds of my home server (a 1.5GHz G4 Mini) going click...click...click...click, just like the infamous click of death remeniscent of Zip drives and DeskStars from a few years back. A verbose reboot (the system was totally hung when I found it) paused just after the journal was replayed (from the hard reboot) with an endless string of 'device reset the bus' messages from the IO manager.
The disk seems completely toasted...likely the result of a head crash. Odd, since it's spent the last 2 years in one spot, unmoving.
Anyone else ever experience something like this?
-dave

Do you have a UPS and a line-voltage-sag protector for your computer?
If not (heck, even if you do): Any chance you had a power hiccup, either a little brownout (low voltage) or brief failure? (AC/kitchen stove clock a minute slower than your battery clocks in the house, for instance).
I've seen machines crash without going completely off, with a power blip.
Pismo/512ke/pb140/150/180/180c/520c/LC/SE30 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Click of death again -- am I doing something to make my hard drives die?

My Macbook (white), purchased in December 2006, is now having the Click of Death for the second time, a mere three months after the last time it had the Click of Death. (Insultingly, this time it happened in the middle of its weekly backup. Lame.) What's even better is this machine was a custom job and the Genius Bars don't seem to stock the 160-GB hard drives, so I'm assuming I'm in for another week of no computer and then another couple of days of reinstalling everything. Even with backups this is a total pain.
Assuming there isn't some fault in whatever batch of 160-GB hard drives they're using, is there ANYTHING I might be doing that could be causing this?
Theories I've seen:
* moving the computer before it is fully in safe sleep mode
* logic board issues
* "hard drives just die"
I've never had a laptop die on me before, let alone twice in the same unit and less than three months after the last time this happened. It's sad that this makes my appalling work Dell look practically indestructible.

Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Being that it has been at the genius bar, take it back there and tell them it has had this happen twice in the past 6 months, and ask for a replacement computer. Rarely are there Mac lemons, but they do happen. It is possible also in installing the hard drive, something got lodged in th IDE interface that slowly decayed its capabilities. One thing I recommend is not to travel with the hard drive asleep. Yes, it takes longer to boot up, but it is possible that your computer case is not well enough protected against innertial movements for the drive to properly park itself. Even strong enough innertial move thinner than a hairline can cause notebook drives to crash. The head is floating less than a mm over the drive platter. Get a better carrying case too, and only turn on the machine when on stable ground. Using it in a bus, or other moving vehical over potholes can also cause problems. An airplane less so, unless you were unfortunate enough to hit a real bad air pocket in the middle of the flight.

Dropped HD this morning, unsure if it's click of death

Talk about a frustrating day... I accidentally had a small drop on my WD Passort Ultra and suddenly it stopped working. When plugging it in, the computer recognized it as a WD Passport drive, but it didn't assign a Drive letter for me to access the directory. After researching online, I understood the only option to attempt to recover my data was that I had to open it up and find out what exactly caused the damage. When opening it, I saw the Head Disk Assembly was locked against the middle of the disk and wouldn't move when connected. I used the instructional videos to correct the Head Disk Assembly and placing it back into the Landing Tray, but when I connect it now, it sort of clicks. When connecting, the disk spins and the HDA runs one time to the middle of the disk and rest back on the landing tray for a few seconds. When watching other videos of the famous 'clicking of death' HD, it repetatively smacks across the disk several times, but mine only does it once every few seconds while only reaching the middle of the disk. I have tried to run recovery software but it doesn't seem to assign the HD to a Drive Letter, only allowing it to be read as a WD hd with a lack of a serial number and other information in the properties. Can someone confirm with me if this drive is permenantly dead or is there a fix around this? I obviously would like to recover the little bits of data I have on there, but I just need another pair of eyes on this after being so frustrated the whole day of trying to make this work.

Dropped HDs are frequently beyond do it yourself recovery. If you are considering professional help don't use the drive any more. The head may be damaging the platters,Joe

Does warranty cover Click of Death?

My 17" Unibody MBP froze last night while running Win7 Pro through Bootcamp. While frozen, I started hearing what I believe to be the Click of Death.
I rebooted and everything seems fine so far, but I'm worried. I am taking fresh backups as fast as I can.
Since the MBP is less than 1 year old, will Apple replace the HDD free of charge? Will they only do this if the disk completely fails - not if it's just showing signs of imminent failure?

First try running Disk Utility to see if the drive's 'Smart Status" is failing, boomerkang. If it is, then I'm sure Apple will simply replace it for you. If it is not then you might want to look at running a more intensive drive test like the one provided by Smart Utility.
If you take it to an Apple AASP they should be able to test it for you anyway.
Drives in modern computers with movement detection sensors, energy minimisation processes, and the like can make other noises that simply sound like the old "click of death", though, so you might not want to assume the worst just yet.
Does Disk Utility detect any errors when you boot up from your OS DVD and run Disk Utility to "repair Disk" from there?
Cheers
Rod

How to fix click of death on External Hard Drive

PLEASE PLEASE READ ALL!!!!!!
My Hard drive is a:
G-Drive slim 500GB EHD
5400RPM
not sure on warranty.
Here is the story.
It all started when I was plugging in the HD in my sisters school laptop, when all of a sudden, an error popped up saying "You need to format the drive before you can use it." It was inaccessible, What showed up was just "Local Disk" and that error popped up, So I tried to plug it in my MacBook Pro, and Finder didn't recognize it. But when I plugged it in, I got a message saying that the HD was using too much power from the notebook. I tried to make it work by putting my wrecked cable to a position that it would function, Somehow, On Disk Utility, the drive was there but my only partition was greyed out and Repair Disk failed. Several days later, I headed to my nearest Apple Store and they had a look at my Hard Drive and I was told to get a new cable, because of the power danger. (The cable is a Mini-B USB cable, search on Images to know what im talking about) and SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, I got the cable. And when i plugged in the new cable to the drive. The drive started to click and I got very very ****** off. Knowing I WILL lose ALL my data. The point is that, the same things happened, Nothing on Finder but DU was successful on detecting the drive but not the Partition. Files on the HD are my Movies (60GB), My TV Show collection (mostly SpongeBob SquarePants so 25GB?) Backups of my iPod (11GB) and Important files (100GB) It's unbelievable that my large HD is gone forever. But sometimes I think to format but i worry about my movies and SpongeBob TV episodes. I NEED EVERYTHING BACK. About 250GB (half) has been used in the drive. It's ******* stupid that my drive does this.
BTW: I can't do much because i'm 13.
please please tell me to do something.

EmmanIsaac,
Do you just want a new drive that can be read by Macs and PCs? I would suggest taking a look at MacMall and shopping for, at least, a 1TB drive (they're cheap these days) and, when you get it, format it as FAT32 on a PC. Then you'll be able (with some limitations) to share the drive on both platforms.
For the limitations on using FAT32, see here.
Good luck,
Clinton

Right Click of Death

Anyone have this problem? I'm working in Mac: WORD 2008 and when I right click to bring up the window that lets me select "paste" or "cut", you know the use all the time, second nature click - the program shuts down, allows me to send an error report to WORD and then reopens WORD without having saved my work. The patterns is quirky... if I'm wanting to edit text and use the common features mentioned above it kills the program. If I'm doing other graphics tasks such as "change picture" or some word art issues it will give me that windows and let me choose a task. It worked fine for many months. I don't have right click issues in any other software. Did I inadvertently change some option somewhere? Or is this a problem with this program? Any helps, any work around. As with you, its second nature to have done right click for years on almost all programs..now this acts up. CraigT

Hello Craig
Please post questions regarding Office on Microsoft's own forums for their Mac products since this forum is for troubleshooting Apple Software Update for Windows, a software package for Windows designed to update Apple products that run on Windows, and not related to Microsoft Office
http://www.officeformac.com/productforums
Good luck.

Potential click of death

My G4 867Mhz decided to stop starting this morning and all I get from it is an icon of a folder with a question mark in it. This has happened to me before and I managed to fix the problem by booting the machine from CD and reminding the machine which drive was the startup drive.
This time however, when I try and do the same, including running disk utility, the Macintosh HD doesn't appear, so I can neither run disk utility on it nor set that drive as the startup drive.
There is also a nasty double click noise coming from the machine. Is this what I think it is?
Any ideas anyone?
Thanks in advance.
Chris Taylor
G4 867Mhz Mac OS X (10.4)

Another item that may work to get the user files off of the disk is to mount the disk in another machine (or install a new drive and copy the files from the old drive to the new one. As mentioned previously, a Disk Utility like Disk Warrior/Techtool Pro or Speed Tools may fix the drive. Here are some other links:
Safe Mode Startup:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107392
Mac OS X: "Broken folder" icon, prohibitory sign, or kernel panic when computer starts:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106805
Regards,

Click of death hard disk T430 Linux

Hello,
I have a T430 with Fedora 18 and a HITACHI HTS725050A7E630 (firmware version GH2ZB390).
I listened a continuos "click" when i didnt use the hard drive so i use smartctl and i detected that the Load_Cycle_Count grow up after each click. So i use hdparm and disabled the hard drive spindown and the click disappeared. But it's possibile to update harddrive's firmware to support spindown under linux? because the hard drive consume many Watt and the autonomy is very small... (i try to disable the active shock protection under windows but nothing happens..)

UP

Ipod "Click of death", frozen screen, unrecognized by my computer

So i got my ipod like 20 billion years ago(probably 3yrs), it is 20g black and white screen one.
About 10 days after i got it, it broke. It didn't like working on my computer(the good computer).
Currently it isnt recognized by my computer, it says its malfunctioning usb. It came up earlyer but only till it had enough charge to show me a frozen screen, then it stops working.
The frozen screen has just disapeared becoz it ran out of charge, so i plugged it back into my computer and it came up with a ! and a picture of a battery on the ipods screen, but nothing happened on my computer.
Itunes doesnt recognize it all either, its just being annoying, as it has for the past 3 yrs or so.

Ok update, i was able to access it for a short moment then i connected it to the computer, it has frozen the bottom tool bar while trying to use it, but the screen aint frozen but i cant do anything.

IPod Click Of Death

I own a 60GB black iPod Video and get the said icon and a bunch of grinding and wirl! My Hard drive is dead any help?

Yeah, this most likely means that their is a hardware issue. Read here for help:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61771

Portege 2010 - clicks of death? - maybe HDD is dead

Hi,
a few minutes ago I tried to start my portege 2010, which was functioning a few hours ago. Now I won't even get past the BIOS screen because the HDD is making noises in a strange pattern, like the heads are trying to get into position, but are failing. I have to admit that yesterday the system froze for no obvious reason but I didn't realize this was due to an upcoming hardware failure, I just rebooted the machine and it behaved like any other day. So I'm quite puzzled how disaster could strike so sudden. The portege is out of warranty time, so I guess there is no way getting around buying a new drive. I wonder if this problem is a common problem among the portege series, I think I remember an article posted online stating this.

Hello Steffen
If Toshiba sels 10 000 or more Portege 2010 notebooks and you find one or 10 other users with the same HDD symptoms it can not be any kind of common problem. Common problem is something else.
According to your description it is really possible the HDD shows first symptoms of malfunction. All you can do is to watch carefully what happen in next days and if HDD functionality fails you must buy a new HDD. Thats all!
If you will be able to start it somehow I recommend you to back up all your data (for example on USB stick) before HDD crashes completely.

G580 hdd clicking noise

hello. i make a lot of research so don.t tell me about click of death. let.s star my frustrating story. one week ago i start my g580, i was scared that i heard a noise that i was thinking is from hdd. sound like a continous click. after the lenovo logo screen there appears a boot menu and app menu if i remember exactly. i opened the setup menu from app menu and i was surprised to see that the hdd isn.t detected or installed. i tried to switch from ahci in compatible. the same problem. after some tryings i open the laptop and it was started normally. i was very happy and i was watching the godfather 3.) after that i stoped the laptop and some time ago i opened again and it gain the same problem, hdd not detected, clicking again at the start. after a time it appears the blue screen when it has to acces windows. i reinstall windows and after that the laptop works a day with no problem. then the problem appears again. same clicking same hdd not detected. i tried to open nd stop. at the five/six try it works again. now it appears that he will not start again in his life. the clicking noise and that menu appears constantly by this morning.
in conclusion, sometimes it works, sometimes is the click and the windows is not starting. what should i do? my warranty expired two months ago. i used the laptop just on the table. on level surface, not broke it in any way. i remove the hdd to watch if i find something on it. it appears pretty black, like an arsure. very little. i don.t think that.s the cause. please, help me. i don.t have a good financial situation and i can.t waste money for service and diagnostication fo malfunction...

hi aLEXrara,
Welcome to Lenovo Forums!
Im not sure if you will agree on me but the HDD should not exhibit a clicking sound, but clicking HDD does not mean that it is bad and it is the HDD's fault.
If the clicking sound start just right after you press the power and the computer starts detecting your HDD,
First verify it is the HDD that is making the sound.
Try Removing the HDD and start the computer again, if there is not clicking sound that definitely is the HDD.
If you have another computer you can try checking the HDD status by plugging it in and using a scan like HDtune.
or Try using Software like HDD regenerator or the like.
If the HDD plugged in to another computer and still show detection problem, I believe it really has to be replaced.
Regards
Solid Cruver
Did someone help you today? Press the star on the left to thank them with a Kudo!
If you find a post helpful and it answers your question, please mark it as an "Accepted Solution"! This will help the rest of the Community with similar issues identify the verified solution and benefit from it.
Follow @LenovoForums on Twitter!

[SOLVED] Stuck in hibernate state following death of HD

Hi,
Yesterday I got very unlucky. I put my Arch system into hibernation (in RAM). Upon restart, I found out that my secondary hard drive (which does not contain the system, I only used it for storage) had died on me (at start it hisses, then has the typical loud "click of death") beyond repair (I tried the classical recipes in that case: mild shock, freezing, etc...) Anyway, that is not my biggest problem: now I cannot start my system. When I try to start in text mode (fallback), it insists to do some fsck on /dev/sdb1, but of course the drive does not exist anymore. How can I skip this step? Can I edit the /etc/fstab and remove the drive entry, without compromising the rest of the system?
Thanks for your suggestions.
Last edited by zebulon (2010-08-17 16:40:13)

karol wrote:If you boot into single mode (append 's' at the end of the grub kernel line) you should be able to skip the fsck. I'm not sure how effective editing the fstab will be but it shouldn't damage anything.
I had the same issue in single mode, because it said /etc/sdb1 was mounted and e2fsck failed. If I tried to skip the check, it did not go further. On the other hand, removing the /etc/fstab entry for /etc/sdb1 fixed the issue. Thanks.
Last edited by zebulon (2010-08-17 12:50:09)

Click of death?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for