Random Clicking and Freezing

[JHausma2002]

Hey all, just built my first comp, P4 2.6C on a P4P800 board, and besides from breaking one of my cdrom drives, everything went smoothly and I'm now up and running.

My question is this: every once and a while I get clicking noises from what *I THINK* are the hard drives. It sounds like they stop spinning and then start again. This is usually accompanied by a system freeze until the noise stops, in which case normal operation returns.

Its not a major problem for a first time builder I dont think but I dont want anything to get damaged so I thought I'd better ask the experts.

Also, Asus PC Probe will occasionally beep at me because it says my voltage drops too low from 12v. Related at all? A possible fix for either or?

Thanks a lot,

Josh

 

[StormBringer]

What is your Power Supply? brand and model please.

 

[JHausma2002]

PSU

A Turbolink Switching Power Supply

Model: LC-A350ARX 12v

 

[StormBringer]

I couldn't find any specs for that particular model, though I did find a 420W Turbolink for $23, which would lead me to believe the quality is less than desirable. I am not concluding that this is your problem, but I personally wouldn't use that PSU, and low voltage can cause the problems you described, and you did say that you were getting low voltage warnings. Just how low are we talking?

 

[JHausma2002]

11

It seemed to never go below 11 but Asus PC Probe felt it necessary to let me know. Anyways, just had a real frightening problem which must be related.

I had a reboot, and on reboot got the blue screen of death right after the windows xp logo appeared telling me we have an unmountable boot disc.....uh oh. After a bit of trial and error, I installed XP on my other hard drive, booted into that as the main one as a slave, and chckdisc found errors and corrected them for me. So now my main hard drive is back, but that was rather scary. Any thoughts?

 

[JHausma2002]

Hmm

Hmm, you know that little red switch on the back of the PSU? I flipped in, havent noticed any clicking yet. WOuld still like to knwo your take on the blue screen thing, scared the bejeezus outta me.

Thiank I should keep XP installed on my slave jsut in case?

 

[StormBringer]

Little red switch? The power switch and the voltage selector are all that comes to mind, unless that thing has an OLP device.
I would think the reboot and BSOD were caused by low voltage, this can cause random reboots, also, if there was not sufficient power for the HDD, that would explain the unmountable volume error.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

The disks stopping, then freezing while spinning up is probably caused by your power settings. Right-click anywhere on your desktop, select Properties/Screensaver/Power. Your HD is probably set to "Turn off hard disks after xx minutes". If you dont want this change it to "never".
You may have the same or similar settings in your BIOS.