T400 beep when hard disk accessed

[neilt]

Hi all,

I've been trawling the net for this issue, but always seem to find the power supply beep issue that you can disable in the BIOS, I have not found anyone with the same symptoms as me.

My T400 was running fine until it required a new hard drive. Being a company laptop it went to IT and was fitted with a replacement WD HDD. Since then I get ramdon beeps once its up and running, with it I normally notice the disk light flashes.

I started using procmon.exe from MS Sysinternals to try and see if I could find whats accessing the disk, but theres too much info.

The frequency of the beep ranges from once every 2 or 3 mintues, to once or twice a day. I have been working from home the last 2 weeks and not noticed it much at all. Today, in the office its been doing it once every 1-2 minutes.

I have disabled the beep in the BIOS, and it does it whether the speaker is muted or not. I can only imagine its coming rom the mother board? I have reset the disk incase it was a connection issue. Apart from this, the laptop works fine without perfomance issues.

Cheers

Neil

[lead_org Microsoft MVP Contributor]

okay, have you tried to disable the onboard Thinkvantage Active Protection in the control panel and see whether that stops the beeps?

[neilt]

Cheers, have tried that, will see how it goes over the next hour or so.

[neilt]

Nope, thats not solved it :-(

[jmstuckman]

What do you mean by "beep"? There are several possible sources of a beeping sound, and all of them sound different:

(1) Beeping coming through the system's internal speakers. This can be distinguished from the others because it goes away when you plug a cable into the headphone port.

(2) High-pitched noises coming from the motherboard caused by rapid switches between Intel CPU power management states. Some people find these very annoying but there isn't really a fix for this. In this case the pattern of the sounds will change when you switch to another power plan in the control panel.

(3) Squeaking / Beeping coming from oscillation of the hard drive's voice coil (maybe due to recalibration attempts?) I ocassionally get a system with this kind of "noisy" hard drive. If this is the source of the noise, then the noise is actually coming from the hard drive itself, not your motherboard. If this was your problem, you could try downloading the WD control panel / diagnostics application, and tweak some of the hard drive's configurable firmware settings that would shift the drive's noise and performance characteristics.