I kid you not!

See my post in another thread about the tragic loss of one of my HDs after a power outage http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=31779

The dead drive (I am assuming it is so 'cos it does not show up in BIOS or in any other HD utility) is playing music! When powered up, it tries to spinup, makes a very faint burrrrr and plays a nine-note almost musical alarm - in three bars of three notes each. Almost like the tones of a cell phone. Stops after playing several times. No, it is not coming from the computer speaker, I put my ear to the drive, it is definitely from within the housing of the HD.

It is a Maxtor Diamond plus 160G drive, just over a year old. I searched Maxtor's website, they claim the HD does not have a speaker in it, I believe them. Searched google, no luck.

Anyone else with similar experience? This sound is NOT noise, like you would expect a dying drive to make, it is cyclic, regular and sounds almost like the temp alarm of the mobo, except is coming from the HD!

Maybe this will help......

I have had the same problem while attempting to install windows xp professional at work. I don't think windows had anything to do with it since the noise started just after the ram test during bootup. The hard drive was a maxtor 40 gig 7200, brand new. At the time noises started, i got a DOS window that said

! WARNING !
Disk boot sector is to be modified
Type "Y" to accept write or "N" to abort write
Award Software, Inc.

I thought the noise was coming from the speaker but I unplugged the speaker and still heard it. I replaced the hard drive with another new one but it gave me the same noise. I then replaced the MB, RAM, and processor all at the same time (i work at a computer company...plenty of parts there) and the noise and warning message didn't come back and I didn't have any other problems. I googled the above warning message and got results saying the message was due to virus protection being on in the CMOS but couldn't find any site that mentions the noise. The new MB was excatly the same as the other new MB that may have caused the problem so I figure the CMOS and any virus protection settings would have been the same so I'm not sure what excatly the problem was. I havent had the time to figure out which component caused the problem.

If you have another computer available, try hooking your hard drive to that, or if you can get to the CMOS settings (if your computer allows it, compaq doesn't) check to see if you can turn off a virus protection, then reboot. If it boots up, run a virus scan or you may need to repair the disk boot sector somehow.

Jeff, I have six drives in my computer, 2 on a RAID array on the SATA interface and the other 4 are all Maxtors on IDE controllers. This was the only drive that went bad. I do not have virus protection in the cmos, instead I have Norton corporate edition virus checker which runs every morning. I tried hooking up only that drive and the other drives separately, but only this drive sounds the alarm. Yes, it is coming from the drive and not the computer speakers.

Here is why I think its not a software/CMOS/computer related issue: The drive makes this sound even if just the power supply (and no IDE cable) is connected and it does so as soon as I start the computer. The noise goes away after about a minute or so.

I cannot check the boot sector or do anything with the drive since it is not recognized by any program - not by DOS, partition magic, Maxblast, powermax, Ontrack recovery etc.

In any case, I have called Maxtor and they are sending me a replacement drive. Just feel bad about loosing my data.

Thanks for your help.

OK, your problem is a little different than mine. My hard drive started making the noise when the computer tried to boot from it. I hit the reset button and the noise would stop until the computer got to the point where it tried to read from the drive. The noise you described seems identical to the noise I heard.

I recently had maxtor hard drive go bad and lost a lot of data too. I posted the problem on here but eventually came to the conclusion that the drive was trash and there wasn't anything I could do. I'm pretty sure that the firmware on the platter needs to be reflashed, from reading many other posts on the net from others with the same problem. I'll never buy another maxtor drive again!

Did you ask them if they could fix the drive? They should at least make an effort to retrieve the data for you, if its under warranty but I doubt they would.

I did ask Maxtor to see if it could be fixed or the data retrieved, I was told it would cost 'thousands' or dollars!

I read somehting a couple of years ago about the HDD playing music, but cannot find anyhting on the net. For me to suggest it might be this or that would be wrong because I just cannot remember.

Go to the following link, because it was similar to this (This ones about motherboards)

http://www.dfiusa.com/support/music.htm