(I am a noob at all this so please excuse me if I leave out information you need, or if this is the wrong forum for this kind of thing, or if this is simply a silly question to begin with.)
My system info if you need it: Windows 7 64-bit SP1, Intel Core i7-3770 Processor, 2TB Harddrive ST2000DM001-9YN164, 12GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GT 640.
I just bought this system less than 2 weeks ago at Costco and the OS and everything was already installed.
The first thing I noticed is that on boot-up, a noise comes from either the hard drive or maybe the CD drive (not sure). It sounds like "chnk, chnk" and only happens twice then stops. There is no CD in the drive, btw.
Also, the computer "chirps" once when I shut down (happens every single shut down).
In the past, I had some beeps on an old computer and could use them to find out what the problem was (i.e. 3 beeps means ___, or one beep means ___, etc.)... but I can't find anything about a beep during shut down.
So being curious about these noises on a brand new hard drive, I ran Dell PC Diagnostics. (Dunno if that was the right choice or not since I don't really know what I'm doing.) This was the result:
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/JaMhg.png[/IMG]
The "SMART Short Self Test" cannot run... ??
I'm thinking this is probably unrelated to the chirp I hear and to the sound during boot-up, but now I'm wanting to fix whatever this "cannot run" thing means, especially since it's a brand new hard drive.
So, following the Dell Diagnostics suggestions, I did this stuff:
In the device manager, I tried to upgrade the disk drive driver for the ST2000DM001-9YN164 and it said that it was already up to date. So didn't do anything else with that.
Their other suggestion was updating the device firmware. (I shouldn't have to do that on a brand new computer, should I?) So I used the Intel RST program that came with my computer to find that my current firmware version is DC4A for the ST2000DM001-9YN164.... so now how do I tell if there's a new one that I should update to? And do I even need to? Could there be some other problem or do you really think outdated firmware is the reason "SMART Short Self Test" couldn't run?
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Also, I don't know if it's related or not because this is a Windows issue (I think), but sometimes my files and folders just completely disappear. Like a problem with explorer.exe or something? If I wait a while they randomly re-appear. I don't mean a single file or folder either, I mean ALL of them. I click "pictures" or "documents" or any large folder and it shows as completely empty, nothing in it. Explorer.exe is running/started, so I don't get what is going on?? It really freaked me out the first time because I thought all my stuff was gone... but then it magically re-appeared about 10 minutes later. It has happened a bunch of times in the 2 weeks I've had this computer.
This got really long, sorry guys! Thank you so much to anyone that has read this far and has the time to shed some light on these issues. I don't really know much about computers, I just use google a lot to figure out how to find things I'm looking for..
Thanks!!
