Laptop hard drive making clicking noises

[NeelKaturi]

Recently my HP Envy's hard drive has been making a lot of clicking noises. The hard drive light at the left side of the laptop blinks along with the clicking noises. I know that hard drives occasionally make clicking sounds, however, my laptop did not make these noises when I first got it. I got the laptop almost a year ago and the clicking sounds have started in the last few months. I wasn't sure if there was a way to fix this noise or if it is normal. It is quite annoying when I am using my laptop in a quiet environment.

Also, my disk usage often jumps up to 100%. In task manager, it usually says that the System is using the disk the most.

[WAWood]

@NeelKaturi

Hello;

Allow me to welcome you to the HP forums!

Without being there to hear it, it's impossible for us to determine if the noises you hear are just the typical "seek" sounds or indications of a failing drive.

My suggestion is that you run diagnostics on the drive to check it out:  http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c00439024

Please report back the results of those tests.

[NeelKaturi]

When I open up the bios, I do not have a tab for diagnostics. I only have a Main, Security, System Configuration, and Exit tab. Do I need to enable anything to form a diagnostic on my laptop?

[WAWood]

@NeelKaturi

You don't run the diagnostics from inside the BIOS pages; instead, you run them from a startup menu that is displayed by pressing the Esc key repeatedly when the PC reboots.

[NeelKaturi]

I have run both the Hard Drive SMART Check and the Hard Drive DST Check. My laptop passed both of these tests

[WAWood]

@NeelKaturi

The SMART tests are not always reliable and can say a drive is OK when it is not, and vice-versa.

I have found the HP Diagnostics to be far more reliable, but if you have run them and they say the drive is OK, then it probably is.

One more thing you could do is run a Surface Test using this partitioning utility:  http://www.majorgeeks.com/news/story/recover_data_in_3_steps_with_minitool_power_data_recovery_free_...

If that checks out OK, then the drive is probably OK.

But ... I would still do some backups to be safe ...

Good Luck

[NeelKaturi]

I have done some more diagnostics and they all say that my hard drive is ok. The main reason that I believe that the noise is not normal is that it used to be completely silent when I first got my laptop. I've been doing some research and the only explanation I have is that there might be something wrong with the disk heads. I'm not quite sure how to go about checking that.