Clicking Hard drive while paying game?

[SasuTheSpaghettiWrangler]

Okay, so i have had this laptop for 18 months and the hard drive will click every time i play a gome during a period of playing for 60-90 minutes. the hard drive has not sustained any type of physical damage. It also works fine after i close the laptop and open it again. This started occuring during the summer and after i had installed GTA IV. If anyone has had this problem and resolved it, please send me possible fix. Thanks.

Failed solutions:
-Verifying Game caches
-Turning off and on again
- defragging
- Virus scan
- Deleting unecessary files off computer

[rotNdude]

A clicking hard drive generally means the heads are beginning to fail.

[SasuTheSpaghettiWrangler]

引用自 rotNdude：

A clicking hard drive generally means the heads are beginning to fail.

What's the easiest way to back up data, then? But i have to remind you that it has never received any physical damage. Could it be caused by software that is in a bad sector?

[DenHond]

引用自 Jesse Pinkman's Meth Donuts：

What's the easiest way to back up data, then? But i have to remind you that it has never received any physical damage. Could it be caused by software that is in a bad sector?

If you have an external hard drive, put everything of importance on there (documents, photo's music). As for games, you want to look for their save files, you don't need to copy the entire game (and remember where they have to go) and put those on the external hard drive, don't put all your trust in steam cloud, it usually works, but a lot of people have lost their save files because of some error or failed sync.
After a fresh Windows install on your new hard drive, put everything back.
If you don't have an external hard drive (or you can't borrow one for a few days), see what you can squeeze on a USB stick (or burn it on DVD's if you really must).

I had clicking noises as well from my hard drive on my desktop computer (which I never moved in the year that it was in there), it died a month or two later...

[SasuTheSpaghettiWrangler]

引用自 DenHond：

引用自 Jesse Pinkman's Meth Donuts：

What's the easiest way to back up data, then? But i have to remind you that it has never received any physical damage. Could it be caused by software that is in a bad sector?

If you have an external hard drive, put everything of importance on there (documents, photo's music). As for games, you want to look for their save files, you don't need to copy the entire game (and remember where they have to go) and put those on the external hard drive, don't put all your trust in steam cloud, it usually works, but a lot of people have lost their save files because of some error or failed sync.
After a fresh Windows install on your new hard drive, put everything back.
If you don't have an external hard drive (or you can't borrow one for a few days), see what you can squeeze on a USB stick (or burn it on DVD's if you really must).

I had clicking noises as well from my hard drive on my desktop computer (which I never moved in the year that it was in there), it died a month or two later...

Well, whenever the hard drive clicks, when i close the laptop and i open it again and boot it up, POOF! the click is gone, should i still be concerned though? And what if i dont have a External HDD, USB Or DVD? PLUS this has been going on for 4-5 months now.

[DenHond]

Rebooting stopped my hard drive as well for a short period of time, but after a while, it started clicking sooner and sooner. Then my pc started freezing during the clicks and in its last days, my pc was struggeling to boot up.
I can promise you, your hard drive is dying, it could last another week, month or maybe 6 months, but when it does, you'll lose all of your data.

You're screwed if you don't have anything to put your stuff on. You could put your trust in Steam Cloud for the save files of your steam games (not every game supports it).
As for photo's, movies, music and documents, they'd be to big in size for some kind of online storage I figure...

If you were to bring in your laptop to a shop for repair (hard drive swap), you could always ask them to back up ALL of your data first...

[SasuTheSpaghettiWrangler]

May i ask you estimates of the success rate of the steam cloud in this type of situation? e.g 50-75%

[DenHond]

I'd say in around 90% of the cases it works.
The Walking Dead Season 1 failed on me (it forgot my choices when I reinstalled the game for the dlc pack).

[SasuTheSpaghettiWrangler]

引用自 DenHond：

I'd say in around 90% of the cases it works.
The Walking Dead Season 1 failed on me (it forgot my choices when I reinstalled the game for the dlc pack).

Thank you, BTW my HDD is a Hitachi drive. If i do get an external, does it have to be hitachi?

[DenHond]

Any brand will work

[SasuTheSpaghettiWrangler]

引用自 DenHond：

Any brand will work

Thank you for helping me.

[DenHond]

Forgot to mention, you can check wether there's save files of a certain game in the steam cloud:
Go to your library, right click the game and select properties. A menu will pop up and click on the tab 'updates', on the bottom it will state a file size, if it's '0', then there's nothing on the steam cloud for that game, if it states any other file size, there is at least something backed up on the servers.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Is the laptop still under warranty? Very possible u could get the drive replaced via the laptop maker, if still under warranty.

Aside from this you will want to buy an external drive and start backing up data u wish to save.

Saved game files are often not stored in the game install folder, or via Steam Cloud. While some are, not all will be. For this I would suggest using a free app called GameSaveManager.

Should ur laptop be under warranty, u will want to run Hitachi Drive Fitness Test which can run diagnostics on the drive and provide u with any needed error codes and such info. > http://www.hgst.com/support/downloads (click on DOWNLOAD WinDFT)

[SasuTheSpaghettiWrangler]

引用自 Bad-Motha：

Is the laptop still under warranty? Very possible u could get the drive replaced via the laptop maker, if still under warranty.

Aside from this you will want to buy an external drive and start backing up data u wish to save.

Saved game files are often not stored in the game install folder, or via Steam Cloud. While some are, not all will be. For this I would suggest using a free app called GameSaveManager.

Should ur laptop be under warranty, u will want to run Hitachi Drive Fitness Test which can run diagnostics on the drive and provide u with any needed error codes and such info. > http://www.hgst.com/support/downloads (click on DOWNLOAD WinDFT)

Thanks for the Informative Comment. My warranty expired 7 months ago and it was a bit expensive to extend the warranty so no i do not have warranty