When I boot up my computer, sometimes, after the mem check it goes to recognize the 1st hd it stops for like 30 seconds and i can hear a clicking sound. Why? I have had no luck finding out why or how to fix.

Here is what I have and what I have done.
AMD k7 650mhz Gigabyte board
256mb memory
2 IBM 7200 HD 40gb each
W98SE
AMIbios
3D Propehet 4500 64mb vid card

Since xmas i have fdisk 3 times. I am on my 4th vid card. I thought that was the original problem causing my blue screens which is why i originally fdisk. Good news I have no more blue screens. I changed the hard drive from IBM 20gb to 40gb. I have checked and all the fans are running, so I am not overheating. I have swapped the memory sticks to make sure they were reseated and not causing the problem.

At this point very frustrated. Going to change the power supply this weekend. I am assuming this is hardware related? Running out of ideas and parts to change. Never heard a drive click before. Once it stops clicking it picks up the master hd and the slave and the cdroms and boots fine. ??????

ATA controller maybe? Your mobo is old enough to get chip failures. Try putting the HD on another channel or trying out a separate PCI ATA controller.

Try the ribbon cable first, make sure it is firmly connected to both the HDD and the mobo. If that doesn't help then you might try replacing the ribbon cable. If it still persists it could also be the controller as Nodsu mentioned, or the drive itself. There might be bad sectors on the disk surface. Most HDD manufacturers have a utility that can correct this. It doesn't always work but I have had very good luck using them in the past. The utility is usually refered to as a recertification tool or something similar. There are also third party tools which do the same thing.

It might be a heat issue arising from the way you use your hdd. If you leave your computer on for long periods of time then switch it off say once in 2 days for a while, when it comes back on I would expect clicking until the harddrive warms back up again (clicking can either mean it is dying OR it can mean that the harddrive failed a seek and is recalibrating).

When a harddrive is warm, it expands and being a mechanical device, the sectors will be in different positions to when it is cold. So the harddrive clicks - re-seek.

So I say when you boot your computer go into bios or something and let it sit there for a few minutes until it warms a bit then try resetting and see if it still clicks. If it doesn't then hey presto thats your problem. I cannot see this being a cable related problem.

(Oh and for reference I have had a harddrive that has done what I described above... 30GB Quantum FB 7200RPM ATA66).

Clicking Update

I unplugged my second hd and I have not gotten any more clicking. Could be the second Hd is going? Just realized I only have a 250watt power supply too. Just put in a 300. Gonna see if that maybe is the problem. Grasping at straws right now