G4 laptop goes "Cluck cluck"

[Cow Loon]

Every now and then (once every 3 months or so) my laptop makes a "Cluck cluck" noise, which is then followed by either the computer freezing for 30 seconds or so, or it completely freezes and then has boot problems.

Do you recognize this? I picture the noise coming from an arm of the hard drive, but I'm not sure. S.M.A.R.T. status says Verified.

When it has the boot problems after clucking I think it might have to do with overheating, because booting then works if I let it sit powered off for 20 minutes or so.

I'm more interested in the situation where it freezes momentarily after clucking. Any ideas?

 

[eric2006]

The only large, moving things in your laptop are the fans, the disk drive and the hard drive. "Clucks" usually come from the hard drive in my experence, because of how it moves. Fans would be more of a constant, rotational sound, and the disk drive wouldn't make noise without media, usually. It may be nothing, but buy a backup drive if you don't have one.. and Time Machine. You could also buy a new drive, but it looks like you may be able to get some use out of this one.

 

[icemanjc]

Usually the "clucking" sound is bad, my iBook did it for a day and then the hard drive died, and I couldn't get it to do anything, I even tried freezing it.