Alright i just bought this laptop off a friend today and really hoping i didnt just get screwed over. As soon as i got home i wiped Winxp off of it, and started installing untouched Vista Ultimate SP2 x64. At about 3 percent, the hard drive icon went off and i started hearing these crazy clicking noises. At first i thought it was the dvd drive so i opened it and closed again and it continued the whole way through installation to the desktop. Tried installing windows update and it started doing that again, and it froze the whole thing till i took the battery out. The guy i bought it off of had it constantly sitting on a cooling stand so i am guessing the hard drive is f-ed any time it heats up? The noise specifically comes from the hard drive area. Could it really just be a faulty driver? Sorry that i do not have more information because at the moment i can't even get it to go the whole way to the desktop, i am trying to let it cool down. Maybe by time someone reads this i can turn it more on and gather any additional information that may be needed Edit: Ok i was able to get it on again and in the device manager there is still two base system devices that do not have drivers. But why would it be working now? I can do basically anything i want to at the moment. If it was a driver issue i dont think i could really see it working sometimes and not others.
Follow two cents advice, and if the drive checks out check into this: Is the noise only coming from it when you are doing system intensive activities? If so, it could be that a cpu cooling fan or gpu cooling fan (rare in laptops but sometimes there is one as well) is defective and is making the noise when it powers up to cool the system. If it was previously always used with a cooling stand that pulled air through it, the internal cpu/gpu fans might not have ever come on. The air being pulled by the stand might have been enough to keep the heatsinks cool, and the temp sensing never activated the fans. If thats the case, the majority of laptops have replacement cpu or gpu heatsink and fan kits that you can replace the defective ones inside. Just can be a pain to open some laptops to get to them. This does sound like a HD issue, but a lot of CPUs these days will drop their clock rate drastically when they start to overheat in an attempt to prevent damage, so if it is booting, and then gets slower and slower until it practically freezes, then that could be the CPU overheating.