Hard disk constantly whirring loudly

[VizP]

Hello all - Ive been playing EQ2 for a long time but I took a break after Echoes of Faydwer for 6 months or so but wanted to come back and enjoy the game again. Ive come across a strange hardware issue that was not present before - in EQ2 my hard disk whirrs loudly as soon as the game loads and continues non stop! I have a Dell XPSGen5 3.2 GHZ P3 (Dual Core), 1 Gig Ram and a Radeon X850XL Platinum 256 vid card - the same set up I used to have before. The only time I have ever seen it happen in EQ2 before was in a very small section of a zone in Kingdom of Sky - on one of the isles near the Halls of the Awakened with the [ich kann mich gerade nicht beherrschen] and the spirit creatures that would repeatedly pop. I recall it because my hard disk started to crank it up to full grear just for that area and boy was it loud. Only now it is doing it almost non stop anywhere I go - I was standing in my room (East Freeport 2 bedroom place) and it was whirring loudly, then after ten minutes or so seemed to quieten down. I stepped outside and boom there it was again this time constantly. No settings have been changed to increase the load on my system - any ideas how to diagnose this and make my HD calm down? Thanks in advance!

[antwar]

<p>first thing i would recommend is to download and run the latest hard drive diagnostic tools from your hard drive manufacturer, be it maxtor, WD, seagate, etc. if everything checks out according to that, it could be that the hard drive is ok for now, but slowly going out. </p><p>being a moving part, it can go out at any time, and i have seen brand new drives that have arrived DOA. i would recommend making a full system backup using norton ghost or acronis true image or whatever else you want to use, but make an image of the entire drive now is better than not having one and having the drive suddenly fail and loosing everything. whenever i buy hard drives, i usually buy 2, one for the main system drive, and another that i only plug in for image purposes, but still leave it in the case. and i usually back up once a month or shortly after installing a new piece of software, like a game, and that is only after i have tested it thoroughly so i make sure it does not cause any system instability. if it makes my system unstable, i just revert to the previous hard drive image. this can be a bit spendy in the long run, but it does make problems from hard drives almost non-existant for me.</p><p>i suggest getting a new drive (or 2 like i do) and imaging the drive to one (or both) of the new drive(s) so that in case it does indeed fail, you at least have something to fall back on.</p><p>that said, having usb keys or CDs/DVDs for file backups also makes alot of sense. what happens if the drive craps out between your latest image attempts, and you loose almost a month worth of files? i like to do daily/weekly file backups from my files in my documents, or wherever you save your working files to, like word documents, exel spreadsheets, pictures, etc.</p>

[Bloodfa]

<p>First thing's first: are you positive it's the HD and not a fan going on the fritz?</p><p>Second thing: get another HD and follow the above poster's suggestion.  I worked as a tech for several years, can't count the number of data recoveries off of failed drives, and many of them wouldn't have been needed if the owner had backed their info up before it tanked out on them.  Noise from a hard drive = bad omen.  Noise from anything spinning at 7,200 revs per minute is never a good thing.</p>