I wasn't sure whether you were saying that the hard drive itself was making 
this sort of noise or whether this was in fact your motherboard's BIOS 
sounding a warning alarm through the system speaker.  It sounds more like 
you were describing a motherboard alarm being triggered; so, you might want 
to enter the BIOS setup immediately upon booting and see what the hardware 
monitoring section has to show.  See if there are any settings that are 
being monitored and whether it looks like anything is close to going beyond 
the threshold levels.

John Sproule

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Venkat Viswanathan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2006 10:09 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] hdd sound


> My six year old MAXTOR QUANTUM FIREBALL 4GIG has stated making an "English 
> siren" sort of noise during the entire "post" process/avg boot sector 
> virus scan and stops the moment win 98 se splash screen appears.
>
> after this there is no problem and the o/s loads fine. this happens every 
> time i boot up cold or restart.
>
> my mobo is S.M.A.R.T capable and in fact this is shown during "post".
>
> i have got a S.M.A.R.T warning when i connected a "known" bad hdd just to 
> verify .
>
> any ideas what could be wrong? this has started just recently and as usual 
> i failed to note the exact date/time just to check if i had done anything 
> prior to this which could have caused this.

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