What’s that horrible ticking noise?

I got a call today from someone who’s system fails to start while accessing drive 0. And there’s this really nasty ticking noise coming out of the case. Ugh, when your hard drive starts ticking, that usually means something bad. I told her that first step is check the cables and make sure they’re seated fully and correctly, and failing that, it’s likely a dead hard drive.  Luckily, drives are inexpensive, under $100 for a terabyte drive.  If you hear a ticking noise from your computer, it’s probably a bad thing, fans slapping something, though that usually sounds like a grinding noise, hard drive failure, or possibly power supply getting ready to fail. Whatever it is, have it checked out before it becomes a big problem.

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