gtwister09 Posted January 16, 2011 Report Posted January 16, 2011 Denise, A backup of the hard disk is one thing to restore files but it doesn't always take care of the operating system, registry and so forth. Leatheroo has given some great advice about Acronis True-Image. It makes a duplicate image of the hard drive that included the boot partition, registry and all files at the point in time snapshot. I have been using this since the mid 90's for all my machines including my Windows servers and my Linux server, Sure makes life nice to install a new drive and boot Acronis up. Select the image and wham.... I am exactly where I was at when I made the image (generally less than 45 minutes start to finish). I don't have to install an OS, all the programs and the backups. I use various methods of these OS images, some backups, replication, consolidations, synchronization with external drives, offsite storage, versioning and a couple of other methods to keep data and OS's available as quickly as possible. A combination of backup and image creation would serve you well. Regards, Ben Quote
Members hivemind Posted January 25, 2011 Members Report Posted January 25, 2011 Denise, Many things can cause a computer to make a clicking noise. It is NOT necessarily your hard drive. You could have something in a fan, a wonky cd drive, or a few other things. Best to make sure before you go through all the trouble of a new hard drive. Go to your Control Panel, into Administrative Tools, into Event Viewer, then click on the "System" entry on the list on the left side. Do you see a lot of errors (X in a red circle) with a "Source" of Disk? If you do, it's time to back up and get a new HDD. If you don't, look around that log a bit and tell me what you do see in the way of errors. There are many things that will show up as errors that are not particularly worrisome, and a few that are. Just give me a general idea of the amount of particular errors (not Warnings or Information entries) and I can help more. Don't worry, I'm a professional. I do this every day, all day. Quote
Contributing Member Denise Posted January 25, 2011 Author Contributing Member Report Posted January 25, 2011 Hivemind, It hasn't made a clicking sound since that day, but it seems to be running a little louder than it did before, and not just because a fan is running. I know that noise. I did what you said. Not a lot of red Xs, but a few. None from the day the clicking happened. Lots if Information lines and some yellow warnings. Red Xs Dcom three times of which twice were today, (Interesting, at one point today my keyboard quit connecting to the computer. I turned it off and on again and things worked. This has happened before. Connect to this????) WPDMTP Driver twice, Service Control Manager twice W32Time 22 times, all on the 7th of January over a 5 1/2 hour period. I don't recall problems with the computer that day. Warnings - Looks like close to 1/2 of the 2163 events are a warning reading disk all on December 31 at 4:47:55 pm. Considering we were away over that time period and not only was the computer off, but unplugged, I have no idea why that is like that. 15 other warnings - 6 of which are disk, 8 are Tcpip, one (December 31, 4:47:56) is ntfs. Thanks to everyone who has answered. I do have good backups done but haven't sprung for the image creation - yet... Quote
Members hivemind Posted January 26, 2011 Members Report Posted January 26, 2011 The errors are nothing to be concerned about, for example, the W32Time one is just Windows trying to sync it's clock with an external time server. On 7 January was your internet down or off for a while? That would easily explain that one. No need to answer, since we don't need to chase it down. Just food for thought to explain that one error. The others are all similarly unimportant, especially in the low frequencies you're describing. If your event log was full of DCOM errors, we might want to chase that, but just a few is nothing to worry about. I'd say that you're not about to lose your hard drive. Most likely there was something in a fan (piece of thread or whatever) or your CD Rom drive had a hiccup and wouldn't eject for some reason. Happens sometimes. Does your CD Rom drive eject immediately when you push the button on the front? Quote
Contributing Member Denise Posted January 26, 2011 Author Contributing Member Report Posted January 26, 2011 Does your CD Rom drive eject immediately when you push the button on the front? Yes. Not a problem there. Good chance the internet was down on January 7th. That happens here not uncommonly. I will keep the back ups current and I know it is time to blow out the computer again, so will put that on the list. Thanks again for your help, everyone! Quote
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