A workstation is making a loud clicking noise that is originating from the hard drive and it is not booting. Which of the following should the technician do FIRST?

Question

Options

• AVisit the hard disk vendor's site and run a hardware check on the drive.
• BPut the hard drive in another system and back up all data from it.
• CRun CHKDSK immediately and replace the drive if it is bad.
• DFormat the drive and restore from a previous image.

• A
  3% (1)
• B
  84% (26)
• C
  10% (3)
• D
  3% (1)

Explanation

A repetitive clicking sound from a hard drive - commonly called the 'click of death' - indicates imminent or active physical failure of the drive's read/write heads or actuator arm. The drive could fail completely at any moment, so data preservation is the top priority. The technician should immediately move the drive to a working system and attempt to recover as much data as possible before it becomes unreadable. Running vendor diagnostics (A) or CHKDSK (C) puts additional stress on a failing drive and risks losing data. Formatting and restoring from an image (D) destroys existing data entirely. Data backup always comes first when physical drive failure is suspected.

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