Hard drive makes funny noise in Linux, but not in Windows...

[GrdLock]

I recently installed Mint Linux on my desktop. Weird thing... whenever I'm in Linux, my hard drive makes a funny noise when accessing, I can hear all the activity when it's accessing. If I reboot into Windows, it doesn't make the noise, only when I'm in Linux.

What could cause that? Does Linux have some different way of accessing the hard drive that would make it make noise? I'm worried that it's bad for my hdd too. Any ideas?

[ikermalli]

The same thing happened to me, I left it running for a bit (a few weeks) then all of a sudden my computer stopped working, then I checked it out, my HDD and Mobo were friend and everything got screwed.....


lol just joking! I got linux ubuntu yesterday and I am wondering the same thing. But after I ran it for a night the hard drive seemed fined, so just let it get used to it I guess...

[techieMoe]

I recently installed Mint Linux on my desktop. Weird thing... whenever I'm in Linux, my hard drive makes a funny noise when accessing, I can hear all the activity when it's accessing. If I reboot into Windows, it doesn't make the noise, only when I'm in Linux.

What could cause that? Does Linux have some different way of accessing the hard drive that would make it make noise? I'm worried that it's bad for my hdd too. Any ideas?

Your harddrive's acoustic setting could be getting changed when you boot into Linux. I had my harddrive start clicking at random intervals on my laptop when I first installed Linux on it. There are tools that you can use to change the acoustic mode, and you might also be able to change it in your BIOS.

I use hdparm to control the clicking on my harddrive, but be sure to read all the warnings involved with using low-level harddrive utilities. Make sure you know what you're doing.

As far as I know, the noise isn't damaging to your harddrive. It's just annoying, obviously. I've checked and re-checked my harddrive using every utility I could find and have come up with no errors. If you're worried you can always do the same. There are a number of free harddrive integrity checkers available for Linux and MS Windows. If your PC has a diagnostic disc you can probably boot from that to check the drive.