7200rpm 60gig 'chugging noise', weird looking blue screen

[ryan]

my hard drive sounds like a horse walking with hooves on, or like a tick tock sometimes. it's new! just got it tuesday, 3 days ago. should i send it back? i've heard that this is indicative of a bad head.

also, i was in the middle of playing a game when the computer just went to a bluescreen with black outlines of large rectangles all over, and then it rebooted. could the problems be related?

[pat]

did you upgrade the firmware?

[cynic]

The ticking is normal for the first 7-8 days of a new machine. It's the system running background optimizations on the disk drive (moving boot files closer to the beginning of the platters, etc) If it's still there after using the machine for just over a week, then I'd be concerned. Those sounds should slowly start to fade away.

As for the bluescreen and reboot, that sounds more like the game caused it (if only because of the "rectangles" described.) If it was the hard drive, it would just all come to a stop.

[ian]

I'd be interested to know what a horse sounds like with it's hooves "off"...