Laptop noises - possible hard drive problem?
 

I have a Compaq x1000 laptop.

Its dual booted with gentoo and XP Pro. It's on its second hard drive (40 gb Fujitisu or Hitachi - i can remember which).

When I am in XP, certain touchpad events (paiging through a pdf file, minimizing all windows to desktop) cause a short, louder than expected "disk access-type" noise. Longer disk-access events (running spybot) are silent.

When I am in Gentoo, i get a constant high-pitched whine, which only goes away during longer disk access events (compiling a kernel, updatedb, etc.)

The XP behavior is annoying, but the gentoo behavior is worrisome. Am I headed toward another hard drive failure, or is there something possibly wrong with my gentoo install?

(The noise SEEMS to be coming from the HD. Its a laptop, so i could be wrong)

Any suggestions or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

I doubt whether a software install would produce a problem such as this. I assume you're approaching a 'crash'.

That's what I am afraid of.

But, then why would the noise not occur in the XP partition? Some platters on the disk are OK, perhaps?
And what type of issue would cause noise on inactivity, and not during heavier use of the CPU or hard drive.

Any other sources of laptop whine that could be culprits?

The only sources of noise would be fans, on the chip or power supply, or the turning hard drive. The fans would be a constant, the hard disk must position a head to read information from one of the platters. If there is a bad spot in one or more sectors, it might cause the problem. You could always reinstall linux and prior to the install scan the disk partition completely for bad sectors.

Might this help?
http://www.x1000forums.com/index.php...=2431&hl=noise

I used that to take care of the noise in XP, however the whining in Linux remains.

The whine sounds like a fan running at max speed. See if you can figure the fan speed in the bios, probably under power management. I didn't see you model listed for Linux compatibility but you might check and see if there are any utils for you model to adjust the fan speed.

are you overclocking anything. If so i would be very careful not to overclock too much. You might be close to burning something out.
:twocents:

Its a laptop i often use on my lap - the extra heat from overclocking would not be comfortable.

The consensus from over at the x1000 boards that it is the centrino processor going into and out of a idle state at a rapid rate.

I recompiled ALL power management options as modules (apm, apci, and centrino speedstep) and after a little experimentaiton if i turn off the apci stuff (apm stuff doenst appear to work) - specifically the apci processor module - and turn on the centrino speedstep, the noise is gone for now.

Any possible bad effects from turning off acpi?? Is the centrino speedstep stuff taking over the powersaving/heat control role?

(what is the name of the heat sensing thingie for linux - lm_sensors or something?)

Yes, lm_sensors will sense whatever there is to sense from the motherboard's sensors and report it,
provided it's a sensor setup that is supported by lm_sensors; most are or can be made to be. But you
have to be careful to set it up right or you can get misleading values very easily.

The support at lm_sensors is phenomenal. They really want to help users get their setups right.

Do a search on LQ on lm_sensors for more information and problems and solutions users here have had
(including myself).