I let my clients run their hardware for as long as they want. Sometimes this is a good idea, sometimes not.

I find that laptops last for a good 3 years, desktops can go even longer.

But one of my clients had a clicky, clicky noise coming from their vintage Dell Optiplex that shipped in 2001.

Now clicky, clicky noises are bad, but then so  is any unusual noise coming from a hard disk and should be taken as a warning of impending failure.

I replaced the user’s PC and took the old hard disk back to try and recover some of the users data.

In this case I wasn’t successful, the damage was too far gone. This was very disappointing as usually I have a good success rate with data recovery.

I basically take the bad hard disk and connect it in as a second drive in a working PC. I then boot Windows XP from the first hard disk and mount the fault faulty drive from inside windows.

So in a parting note: Remember to back up as bad things do happen.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 16th, 2007 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Blog Entries, Dell Optiplex, Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.