Ping Pong noise...

Thanks for that, midwest138, but I think for the time being I can live with the noise. It's really quite low, almost imperceptible really if there's even a small degree of ambient noise, and, it doesn't occur very often at all. (I
b think
I heard it only once today.)

I'm curious, though, did you find out what was causing the noise? And also, what exactly does the program that you found do, or, said differently, how does that program operate to get rid of the noise?

Please let us know & thanks again for the thought.

The problem was the hard drive. The program stopped the marble sound or click from happening. I couldn't find the thread with the specifics on how it works.I remember it had to do with the parking of the head on the hard drive. Any way it does work and I'll leave it up for a while. The noise annoyed me so I found the program quite useful.

Hi, midwest138!
When I try your link, there is a message "This published page no longer exists. FileSharing15.html", so I can't find "NoHDclickobjc.app". Would you please tell me how to get this app? Thank you! Greetings, Gisela

While I haven't heard this sound yet on my PB I have experienced it with two desktop PC's. Unfortunately for me it turned out to be the HDD dying. In the case of the first one I started hearing the noise and didn't think it was anything other than the drive parking itself as it was usually occuring when I wasn't directly using the PC but had it on. Once it started locking up the system after the 'pong' sound I started to worry. I tried defragging the drive and it would crash in the same spot every time. I figured it for a bad block, or sector and was guessing that every time the disk tried to write to that part of the disk it was failing. I replaced the drive and all was well.
The 2nd PC I experienced this one I didn't wait for the lockups. I just replaced the drive. Oddly enough, I still had the first drive from the other PC. I set it up as a slaved drive, formatted it and it's worked ever since as a 'virtual' filing cabinet of sorts for me.
What I would be concerned with is the level of the sound itself. For me it sounded like the drive was either struggling to park itself or the sector of the drive was pushing the read-write head away (if that makes any sense) hence the 'pong' sound. I pictured the little arm with the head on it slapping back and forth across the disk. That seems to be an indicator that the drive was failing or would be failing soon.

P.S. My guess would be that the app midwest is using is probably APMTunerx.

It is your disk. It is experiencing seek errors.

Mine did this for nearly a year since it was new, but only at high elevation (like 7000 ft). Apparently the pressure differential caused the hard disk to distort a little messing up the alignment.

Apple repaired it under warranty.

- gws

My new Powerbook arrived yesterday and had this noise happening. I'd say it was going about twice per minute on average. Sound reminded me of a ball-bearing dropping on the PowerBook.

Anyway, I tried the hardware test and verified with disk utility and all seems fine.

So, I thought I'd try leaving stuff running overnight (such as quicktime looping a movie) to give some wear and tear to the hard disk.

Woke up this morning and the PB was pretty hot but not more than my old 12" would feel at times. Seemed to be okay and the noise wasn't happening so I thought I'd reboot it.

It hung when it was shutting down so I forced a power off. Started back up with a brief glimpse of a folder icon with a question mark and then stuck at the startup symbol.

Powered off again and started it with the CD in the drive to run hardware tests again. All passed. Drive utility reported no errors so I turned off and on again. Same thing.

Turned off again. Left it about 10 minutes and tried again... nothing! Totally dead.

Doesn't sound good to me. I need to try resetting the Power Management (PMU?) when I get home but even so, it doesn't bode well for a new machine. 😟

did anyone ever get the NoHDclick app file? Am currently using APM Tuner X but without that the chunk is irritating and worrying.

If you have smartmontools installed try:

smartctl disk0 -a | grep Load CycleCount

the number of park/unparks I have had is incredible given the (lack of) age of the laptop.

mick.

PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

I just recently purchased a used TiBook. The first thing I noticed about the computer was a faint click from the hard drive every 30 seconds like clock work. It is particularily noticable when it is dead silent in the room before the fan kicks on. I've heard failing hard drives and this is a different sound. I believe the people describing the parking hard drive heads are accurate. I've even seen a review of a new 17" Powerbook where the user describes the hard drive doing this ( See "Hard Drive "Clicking" Noise" under "Quirks" in this review). I'd like to visit an apple store to see if the Powerbooks there have this "clicking" as well.

Needless to say, once you notice the sound, it can drive you half nuts! It is not a random hard drive noise, but happens on my laptop every 30 seconds when the computer is idle or when I'm just surfing the web.

I downloaded the NoHDclickObjC.app from the link provided previously here in this post (Thank you Mick Angel, you truely are an angel!)... and activated it... no more clicking!

The NoHDclickObjC.app is now a permanent fixture in my dock (you have to activate it every time you start up). I wish I knew who made this application and the reason why it works, because I would gladly donate to the individual(s) who have saved my sanity!!!

TiBook G4 1GHz 15" Mac OS X (10.4.3) 1 GB Ram, SuperDrive

As one who have lost eleven harddrives to crashes, my advice is to take ANY unusual sound coming from the harddrive, even if very infrequent (I had a crash about a month after the first strange 'clicks'), as a sign of the disk's impending doom. Keeping a backup is a fantastically good idea, even if it turns out that the disk is just fine. Trust me, it's worth the money.

(If you've always had this clicking sound, it might just be the normal harddrive-is-parking noise though)

Advice taken... since there was only 6 months left on the extended warranty on my TiBook when I purchased it, I also purchased an external hard drive and make back ups religiously.

It's always hard to determine what is "usual" and "unusual", unless you have numerous, identical computers sitting to compare.

I also noticed my TiBook only makes the "clicking" sound when the power cord is connected. The "clicking" is absent when using battery power, which would indicate the cause of the sound is somehow related to the Energy Saver settings. I've tinkered with the Energy Saver settings for DC power to no avail though.

Not sure if this answers the question, I don't think it does, but it may help move us closer.

midwest138...

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Click here to learn more.

...Ron

are you talking the niose it makes when you adjust the volume

"are you talking the niose it makes when you adjust the volume"

Nope.