Thread: Clicking noise from laptop running on Ubuntu

It depends on the manufacturer of HDD of your lappy..thats what i came to know after hovering around Ubuntu forums..Dell uses HDD from various manufacturers.Mine is from WDC..

anyhow this problem was reported long back but still not fixed..people are also claiming that it's hardware manufacturer's fault:S..Some firmware updates to HDD solves this issue to an extent.

anyways why to bother about all such hassles of Firmware updates, so decided to Jump to Debian.

I do remember reading somewhere long time ago that WD hdd's do not play nice with Ubuntu power management
Random Synapses Blog Archive Fixing Western Digital Scorpio clicking noise

I also found many more results on the net similar to the one above. The above problem was in general with WD hdd's , which was fixed by a firmware update but the problem persisted with linux even after the update!!

Thats why when I replaced my 80GB laptop HDD for a bigger one (320GB) , I chose Hitachi , and its been working good with Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.10 .

yesterday downloaded Debian..initial experiance not that great..Coudn't get the GUI installer to work..anyhow managed to install it..but it doesn't recognize my screen resolution of 1280 x 800.didn't detect Ethernet card, wifi also..need to find a way to get these things to work.

I know it's rude to say "I told you so" but...

I TOLD YOU SO!

If Ubuntu is giving you that clicking issue, try one of the other "user friendly" recommendations above (Mandriva, Fedora and openSUSE, maybe Mint also) avoiding Debian/Slackware....

yeah!!..will try fedora...hope that it doesn't produce clicking noise..

I installed Fedora..clicking noise is there in Fedora too..i think it's a problem with Linux kernel itself..:S

hmm
thats weird!
As I mentioned, I once had this problem with Ubuntu and at the same time it wasnt present in Fedora (I always had a triple boot..Vista , Fedora , Ubuntu)

Also I had read somewhere that this is due to aggressive power management settings with Ubuntu which put the HDD in low power state more often than Fedora..I can confirm this overall as always Fedora gave me lesser battery time than Ubuntu)

So .. I dont like to say it .. but "may be" your HDD is faulty....though I hope I am wrong!

If you folks had read the forums correctly it is a hardware bug and some OSes work around it (hide the issue) better than others...

You might want to apply the "ugly fix" mentioned on the ubuntu forums...