Hard disk spinning all the time.
 

Hello,
After making some changes to my PC, (Installed a new burner, took out everything and cleaned it, there was loads of dust). Once I booted up my machine I noticed that the hard disk is always spinning and making noise, from the second I boot, even when it's just on the bootloader, or in setup or in linux. The machine seems to be working fine tho. What makes it even weirder, is that I have two hard disks, one is serial ATA, the other IDE. And no matter which one I plug in the same problem occurs. I have two questions, is this dangerous? and the obvious one, how can I fix it?

Thanks

I guess that's a "design flaw" of all hard-disks mate ;)

Unless explicitly told not to spin (e.g. being sent
a power-down command) hard-drives spin, not only
yours, everyones. And not all hdd's can be stopped
either.


Cheers,
Tink

hehe, u sure? the thing is the noise is loud let me say whirring not just spinning, and the hard disk LED is on all the time, which I'm pretty sure isn't normal cos normally when I'm doing nothing, the hard disk light goes off, and the noise is almost inaudible.

I have found in the past that with floppy drives this happens when you have the ribbon cable flipped wrong.
You may want to pull the drive out again and examine the pins.
Check the ribbon cable and insert it correctly.
You may have bent the pins or damaged the ribbon cable.

It should only go in one way, but sometimes human error causes it to go in the other way.

Yes, I am ...

The second part of your description however
indicates that what you hear isn't the hdd spinning,
but the heads repositioning. The indicator LED has
nothing to do with the hdd's spin, either.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks dude, don't want 2 sound annoying or n e thing, I'm just really worried about my data, is it normal for the hard disk head to reposition itself all the time?, it never stops, even if I leave it doing nothing 4 ages, by nothing as I mentioned earlier even just leaving it on the bootloader or the BIOS setup utility.

I checked the cables, they're fitted the right way.

Thanks again for ur time.

No, that's certainly not normal. Particularly if the machine
just sits & waits in BIOS. Do the drives work normally in
other machines?
As for the hdd's and cables: there are differences in
cabling systems from ATA-33 over UATA to SATA.
What is the controller spec, the hdd spec and the
cable's?


Cheers,
Tink