Ever heard that noise before? And how about lights 2 and 3 along with it? Yesterday I woke up to find my Optiplex 745 was off. This was unusual as I usually leave it running. I turned it on and was informed that "the hdd was operating outside specification; this may or may not mean the hdd is damaged.:" Further into the boot Windows started loading up, then stopped cold with a "System.32/hal.dll is missing or damaged" error. Of course I know what that means... I figure then I'll load up my Puppy Linux co-installation to conduct the file replacements. But Puppy fails to load its window manager... so I do some disk sleuthing and find it's having difficulty accessing anything. I reboot the computer and do an F12 diagnostic... informed the MBR is bad on the drive, so then I reboot again. This time Windows loads, but it's from my second (older) HDD which also had Windows installed on it. The newer HDD (the one which suffered the MBR issues) isn't seen by either Windows or by any disk partitioning software I've yet tried. I look in BIOS and BIOS says it's detected, but there is no ID information. There is also a constant ticking noise coming from the PC: "tick tick tick, tick tock". It seems to be coming from the area of the floppy drive, but this is strange because I cut the power to the floppy drive years ago... it's offline and there is no light besides. The HDD light is on, as are diagnostic lights 2 and 3. What could this mean? Is the hdd dead, or might it be a virus that I just need to beat by restoring the MBR? But if the system won't read the drive, how do I access the MBR?
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