Clicking noises upon startup

just had this happen to me, was such a weird and distinct thing to hear that its was obvious it was coming from the PC.

booted up PC about 10 mins ago and just as i was going to sit down on my chair i heard clicking noises maybe 3-5 times before it went away during mid boot with the little windows spinning circle at the bottom. then everything is fine after that!

tested HDD with defraggler & HDtune

no bad sectors detected. and HDD is in good health!

done some research on the matter and heard that it could be fans / PSU / or HDD as those are the only moving parts to produce clicking noises!

however for now i really wont know whats producing the noise until the next time i boot up my PC.

but im looking for info into what exactly it may be and if it severe enough to put me out of using my PC for quite some time.

Have you blown all the fans (including power supply and CPU) off with compressed air?

NavyLCDR said:

Have you blown all the fans (including power supply and CPU) off with compressed air?

no i never ever use compressed air to clean my fans or PSU. i have a dust protection filter over my PSU intakes / rear of the PC so i can easily slip them off and use a vacuum to clean them.

for fans il use vacuum for the CPU heat sink, and will manually clean the fans with kitchen roll ever so slightly dabbed in water. just enough to cleanly wipe dust off in 1 swipe

The only moving parts in most computers are the fans [power supply, CPU, case/s], the Optical drive when in use and the hard drive. Clicking in the hard drive can be indicating a problem, possible failure impending, the clicking is probably coming from the Voice Coil Relay moving the read/write heads/arms and snapping back against where they park when losing power.

CD/DVD left in the drive?

Berton said:

The only moving parts in most computers are the fans [power supply, CPU, case/s], the Optical drive when in use and the hard drive. Clicking in the hard drive can be indicating a problem, possible failure impending, the clicking is probably coming from the Voice Coil Relay moving the read/write heads/arms and snapping back against where they park when losing power.

hmmm well its going to be a really bad time if it turns out that the HDD is starting to show signs of it slowly dying. especially in such a time as this when im trying to wrap up work before the holidays.

will keep the thread informed after ever restart / clean boot.

it was just so sporadic is all (in terms of time) usually people report failure to boot but my rig booted no problem. normally like every day usually.

NavyLCDR said:

CD/DVD left in the drive?

dont own nor have i touched a CD/DVD drive in many years

well a couple of days have past and have done quite a bit of restarts and shutdowns and have narrowed the problem further down

its either the PSU or hard drive at this point. and the clicking noise will only happen when a specific situation is met, and that is if i turn my PC off completely but leave the socket power still turned on. and if the power is left on for more than an hour and a half-ish and if i come back and boot up my PC when that amount of time has passed. the clicking noise will 95% of the time happen.

i only just got the PSU around 2 and a half years ago and the HDD has been going strong for around 3-ish years. had no problems what so ever with the 2 but i dunno if this means one of the 2 is going out or if its just a specific problem thats happening.

if i turn on my PC but the wall socket power has been switched off during my time of being away. the PC will start no problem once powered.

however as mentioned above if i leave the wall socket switch on and still supply power to the PSU even tho the PC is not on. il notice straight away during boot that it will black screens for a good 3-8 seconds which makes the clicking noise and then processed as regular and sometimes even a second smaller instance will happen which happens for around 2-5 seconds!

but yeah this is all that i have come up with during the couple days of testing.

yup. its safe to say that my HDD is probably failing on me.

just woke up today and turned everything on as normal but the clicking noise went on for far much longer. and seemed to show no sign of stopping. so powered down the PC. tried again 5 minutes later and luckily booted however i now know il need to get a new HDD *sigh*

time to get everything backed up!