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#1 2020-05-25 04:37:11

138fn
Member
Registered: 2020-05-25
Posts: 1

Hard disks begin making clicking noises, become inaccessible

This is a bit of a long post, so please bear with me. I have been unable to find anything corresponding to what I am experiencing in the wiki pages, on this forum, or anywhere online in general.

Additionally, due to the nature of this problem, I am not able to provide exact error message output at this time. If the situation updates and I find a way to attach any sort of direct output, I will update the post with said info.

(This is also my first time posting here. If I have made any sort of mistake or violation of guidelines in my post, please let me know, I will attempt to amend it as soon as I can)

I first set up Arch in mid-February, on an Asus UX510UX (root and /efi on SSD, swap and /home set up on HDD).
I had few real problems with this first installation, until early May, when, as described in the subject, my HDD (again, containing swap and /home) began to make a clicking noise, and suddenly became inaccessible (nautilus crashed when attempting to open any file located on it, commands involving files from it would fail to return any output). Additionally, running lsblk did not show either of the drive's partitions at all. When shutting my laptop off, a "beep" would come from where the hard disk is located within the laptop. Eventually, the drive would become accessible again, but would quickly become inaccessible after short periods of time.

I have had this laptop since late 2017, and have had no hardware issues with it since, so I was a bit skeptical of what the source of this problem was at first. My first measure taken was to backup the entire system during a period of time when the drive was accessible, and then fully format both my SSD and HDD (deleting and re-configuring partition schemes, creaing new disk labels, and removing and re-making filesystems), and re-installing Arch from scratch. This new installation contained the same partition scheme as the previous, however had fewer packages installed, the most prominent ones I can remember being libreoffice, GNOME 3, GDM, and timeshift.

After about a day of use without the recurring issue (in the old installation, the problem would occur from an hour to as soon as the system was booted), I was convinced that the problem was no longer an issue, and was stemming from a problem I had failed to notice with the old installation.

Needless to say, I was wrong. A day later, the exact same problem began to occur again, and on a fresh install of the OS. At this point, with the help of some research on the official manufacturer website, I was convinced that this was hardware failure. I began preparation to replace the drive.

While waiting to make a final decision on my choice of replacement for my HDD, I backed up and formatted the system once again, this time configuring it to use a 2tb external hard drive as a temporary replacement, so I could continue to work while I figured out a permanent replacement.
As I expected, this new configuration worked did not experience the same issue as my installations which used my old HDD. I configured an entirely different setup than my previous installations (i3-gaps instead of GNOME 3, etc.) and continued to use this new system without any problems arising for a week.

As you probably guessed, the problem resurfaced again. The new hard drive began to make a clicking noise similar to the previous, with a slightly different tone, albeit the exact same rhythm. The drive became inaccessible, and the system could not load the drive upon boot, etc. From this point I was completely unsure what to do: I immediately began diving into whatever support material I could find, from across the internet. The closest situations I could find were cases in which the user's hard drive would click, but would otherwise remain perfectly accessible.

At this point, it is obvious that this is a software issue related to my configuration of Arch considering that the exact same issue arose within two separate drives; however, I am unsure as to where I should begin with this. Any support as to what diagnostics I should attempt to begin to find the root of this problem, or any tips at all would be appreciated.

Additionally, both drives remain inaccessible at the moment. My old HDD (internal) is currently inaccessible at the time of writing this, however I anticipate that it will become accessible some point sooner or later. I plan on running smartmontools on it the moment it becomes accessible. My external HDD has remained inaccessible since it began experiencing the issue a few days ago.

I apologize for the length of this post; I wanted to be as detailed as possible in the description of my situation, in substitution for a lack of error messages (as of right now).
I would like to sincerely thank whoever takes the time to read this, and possibly offer their support. Any help is appreciated.
Thank you.

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#2 2020-05-25 05:57:12

d_fajardo
Member
Registered: 2017-07-28
Posts: 1,563

Re: Hard disks begin making clicking noises, become inaccessible

138fn wrote:

At this point, it is obvious that this is a software issue related ...

I'm not sure if this is software related. It looks like the SATA and USB controllers of your motherboard are gone.
Do the drives register at all in the BIOS? If not then it's hardware related so check the BIOS and see if you can find a clue there.
The Asus UX series are a hard beast to fix as it is not modular like the Thinkpads are for example and Asus is not well known for support so good luck.

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#3 2020-05-25 07:59:03

schard
Member
From: Hannover
Registered: 2016-05-06
Posts: 1,932
Website

Re: Hard disks begin making clicking noises, become inaccessible

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#4 2020-05-25 08:05:01

V1del
Forum Moderator
Registered: 2012-10-16
Posts: 21,425

Re: Hard disks begin making clicking noises, become inaccessible

Really running SMART checks and looking at the journal logs that should be on your root partition and thus unaffected by issues of the /home disk should've been your first courses of actions here.  There's little use to the remaining anecdotes in terms of diagnosing this and by reformatting even your root (if I'm reading that right) you probably destroyed these logs (but anyway you should have new ones regardless, you might want to post these).

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