Hard drive clicking noise

[Leonichol]

Hey there,
About an hour ago while I was using my vaio via the power lead, the laptop harddrive started making clicking noises and the system started running very slowly. The OS suddenly became very unresponsive so I was forced to cold boot. However the problem remains, windows tries to start however the hard disk makes the clicking sounds and thus the bootup is very slow, I've yet to actually complete it.

What can I do to solve the problem, the laptop itself was only bought late last week 😞

Kind regards,
Leonichol

[rich912]

Unfortunately a continual clicking or grinding sound, coupled with a slow boot is synonymous with a hard drive that is failing. Assuming that you are receiving no other error messages, press F8 repeatedly at boot and select Safe Mode. See whether this then boots correctly. I doubt that it will, but if it does it may then indicate a driver or malware problem rather than hardware.
If the problem persists then you need to contact Sony asap.

[Leonichol]

Thanks for your reply,

Yeah I suspected a harddrive failure, something I've become all too familiar with in regards to Hitatchi. Safe mode boots like normal boot, far too slowly with no sign of completion.

As for contacting Sony, I tried the VAIO LINK site, and registered with the same name I do here. However on trying to post an esupport message I received 'your serial is already on your profile' which made no sense to me whatsoever. So I tried relogging in, to which it failed saying my password was incorrect (which it wasnt).

Would I invalidate any warrenty I have by replacing the drive myself? (T1XP (t150))

I was expecting much better from a quality manufacturer.
Leonichol

[rich912]

E-support can be a complete nightmare- try phoning. Contact numbers here.
As far as the warranty issue is concerned, I am pretty certain that you would invalidate it by changing the hard drive yourself:smileysad:
Best of luck.

[rich912]

By the way, support will ask you to carry out a system restore so you may as well try that first. Use the recovery disks if you have created them or press F10 at boot to access the HDDR utility.

[kee-lo_]

As it's a week old maybe the retailer is a quicker route?