Solved Clicking Heard Within Computer

There seems to be a clicking noise coming from within my desktop, not really sure what triggers it. I came back to my computer, and it had been inactive long enough that it put itself to sleep. I turned it back on, and after about 1 minute I started hearing a clicking noise. Immediately tried turning it off, and it went through the whole "Shutting Down" screen, and powered off the monitor, but the desktop continued to run, and I could still hear the clicking noise. Held down the power button to get it to turn off. Haven't booted it back up since.

Any ideas on what could be causing it? Liquid cooling?

Any moving parts could be causing the sound, so a HDD or a fan.

Hard drives will click when they encounter serious errors in their operation. The click is the sound of the heads moving to a parking position and then back to the track being read. This is an attempt to jog the heads so that maybe it can read some data that it is having trouble with. The sound will be a rhythmic series of clicks in a pattern. Many times the system will operate very slowly when the disk is doing this.

If it were me I would boot the machine and immediately backup the drive to another disk before it fails completely. First backup your dearest data - docs and pictures and such. Then make a disk image of the drive. Once it is backed up you could try running spinrite (grc.com) on it to see if it can fix it, but I would just replace it with a new drive.


Note that my assuption that it is your disk is just a guess. If you are hearing clicking at a rapid, steady rate then maybe you just have a fan going bad! Definitely get a second opinion...

I don't have a fan, it's all liquid cooling

My hard drive is only about 10 months old, is it usual for it to happen when it's this young?

It can happen any time, but you are still under warranty.

I tried to turn it back on, and got "KERNAL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR". Poked around with the action center to try to restart and use automatic repair to fix it, and got met with "CRITICAL_SERVICE_FAILED" Is this indeed the click of death?

It is not possible to completely diagnose what is happening to your system without seeing it. If it is running, backup as much as you can without delay. Then, right click on the disk drive in explorer, select "properties", then on the tools tab run a disk check to see if the drive has errors. This may tell you if your disk is going bad or, if there are no disk errors, something else is going on.

Ihavemanyissues said:

I tried to turn it back on, and got "KERNAL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR". Poked around with the action center to try to restart and use automatic repair to fix it, and got met with "CRITICAL_SERVICE_FAILED" Is this indeed the click of death?

Click to expand...

Yeah, that is a sure sign that hardware is failing. A chkdsk might be able to isolate the bad sectors but I think your next port of call should be to return it under warranty.