Guys

I have purchased a new laptop and await delivery like a wee boy on christmas eve, and will be moving the trusty desktop onward to a new keeper (my mother). Thing is I am worried about the noises coming from the HDD when it is initially booting. From the moment I press the button, for about 10 to 20 seconds there is a quite loud buzzing sound (similar to when a floppy is searching for a disc which is not there) which gradually goes away. This noise does not persist when the computer is running in normal use. There have been a few light flickery noises though recently when the PC is doing a lot of tasks at one time.

I would like to know if there is a way of fixing this problem through diagnostics on the manufacturers site without formatting or losing any data from the drive.

It is a:

MAXTOR 6L080J4

Cheers

Alex

I would not like that sound as well. It could be drive arm having problems. If you feel comfortable putting a new drive in, they are pretty cheap these days (80 gb from newegg for around 80 bucks). I am not saying the drive is bad, but noises like that are symptoms of a problem

Are you sure it isnt your floppy drive, because every time I start up my comp, my floppy drive makes noises, even when there is nothing there.

If it is your floppy drive (or if you even have one). I think its possible that your first boot device is set to floppy, so it searches for a floppy disk before moving on to HDD or CD-Rom.