I have a rather unusual problem with my Toshiba 500GB (7200rpm) hard disk in Lenovo E330 laptop. The detail of hard disk is given below. It has dual boot OS; Windows 7 and Linux.

The problem is that on start/restart, the hard disk head seems to move back with a ssooo...tick sound and after 2 seconds the grub loads without problem.

So far there is no problem with the disk and everything is running fine. I have checked the disk with windows check-disk utility and there is no bad sector yet (at least on NTFS partition) and the Linux also seems to work fine.

ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: TOSHIBA MK5061GSY
Firmware Revision: MC102E
Transport: Serial, ATA8-AST, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 192 1536000 7 HPFS/NTFS
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/sda2 192 29703 237048832 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 29703 59017 235463680 f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda4 59017 60802 14336000 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda5 29703 44360 117731328 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda6 44361 44372 96358+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 44373 59016 117627898+ 8e Linux LVM

Please help get resolve this furious sound which reminds me of a dying disk.

smartctl -a /dev/sda

The disk you have uses "Ramp load" technology, see:

http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/9076679E3EE4003E86256FAB005825FB/$file/LoadUnload_white_paper_FINAL.pdf

I reckon the "sooo...tick" sound that you're hearing is just the heads being loaded onto the disk, in other words, it's normal.
Older disks had a "landing zone" for the heads but you could get problems with the heads behaving like disc brakes, preventing the disk spinning on power-up. I've had to "bean shake" quite a few disks in my time to get them to spin up. Ramp load disks don't have this problem.

Play Bonny!

Soadyheid, thanks for the information. I am a bit relieved now but still annoyed by the sound.
By the way, there was no such problem with Windows 7 only and it started after Linux installation (dual boot) and installing grub on MBR.

Ahh... You never mentioned this originally. I still stand by my original reply but, thinking about it, if your partitions are something like; sd1a Windows, sd1b Linux, Grub will be on the second partition so, dependant on where it starts on the disk, the heads will be sent there after reading the MBR.

Hmmm... I like the sound of that explanation, the only flaw in it is that if the "sooooo" is the seek to where Grub is, your disk seeks times would be measured on a calendar rather than in milliseconds! I'm not sure whether the, shall we say, "Home" sector is on the outer or inner edge of the disk platters or the middle these days, or whether it changes dependant on the partitions.

If the heads sit in the middle of the data area, the time to seek to the inner and outer edges will be the same, if it's at one of the edges, it'll take twice as long to get to the opposite edge as it would the middle which would mean a slower data rate due to latency. Did any of that make sense? I think I'll go back and sit in a darkened room.

Play Bonny!