Dell Hard drive clunking Possible fix

Yes that’s right people, no more will that annoying hard drive clunking plague you.  Now this is by no means an official fix, and it’s one that I probably won’t try (simply because I’ve gotten used to the clunking and don’t hear it anymore).  From the response to the forum posts it does work.  Downside is that the hard drive will no longer park the heads, so increased power consumption, and also possible data loss if you drop the laptop.  Read the entire forum article before you apply the fix as it might answer your questions (link below)

In order to apply this “fix” you will need to follow the instructions on the dell forums, these aren’t difficult to do so just follow this post.  If you don’t know how to create a batch file read below I will explain it.

Creating a .BAT file
Fairly simple, open notepad insert the required code.  In this case

@echo off
“C:\Program Files\hdparm\bin\hdparm.exe” -B 254 hda

Now save the file and change the .txt to .bat and file type to all files.  That should do it.

This is of course assuming you follow the instructions in the link above.

Let me know if this works for you.

~ by Jon on May 12, 2008.