Xbox 360 Clicking Issue

[Gypsy]

So I took apart a previously dead 360 and fixed it up. Working nicely now except...it makes a clicking noise when it is reading a disc. It does not appear to be doing any damage, but the sound is still annoying. To all the 360 experts that may or may not be reading: what would be causing this?

[ClodBuster]

I'm no expert, but it might be good to know what chipset revision your 360 has, if it is a fat lady. Or is it one of the two slim (Original slim and later Super Slim) models?

Otherwise I'd check the optical drive twice.

[Gypsy]

Yeah it's an old model. I had to tinker with the drive just to get it working (inside of this system was dirrrty from the previous owner presumably chain smoking around it). Didn't see anything that stood out that would make it click like this.

[Digi.k]

My guess is that it is either the:
hard drive
cpu fan
dvd drive

Although the dvd drive gets noisy in operation

[geise]

 Clicking instantly made me think hard drive.

[sirhcman]

Clicking instantly made me think hard drive.

yes and since its right next to the dvd drive on this model one could easily make the mistake and think its the dvd drive. you could install a game to the hard drive and play the game and see if the click goes away. if it goes away then you could rule out the hard drive

[BigusSchmuck]

I'm assuming they are just normal sata drives that use a special caddy for the Xbox 360 no? You should be able to plug that puppy in and run some pc hard drive utilities (like chkdisk).

[Gypsy]

Thanks for the input lads. I'll have to open her back up soon.

[ClodBuster]

Unlike the PS3, which accepts all kinds of generic hard drives, the 360 hard drives need to be either authentic ones by Microsoft, or wonky cheap Chinese bootleg drives with modified firmware or something similar.

I'd stay far, far away from the latter ones, ebay has been flooded with these bootlegs and they're likely to be unreliable as f*ck.

If the hard drive is the issue, you can extract a genuine 500 GB hard drive for the slim 360 from its HDD caddy and install it into the caddy of the fat lady 360. It will be accepted flawlessly, provided you've got the system's updates installed. Did that by myself.

[Gypsy]

Well I ruled out the hard drive last night by swapping with another 360. The quest continues.

[ClodBuster]

Oh well, at least that's one thing less to care about when searching for the cause.

About the bootleg HDDs, I just remembered that these won't let you play old Xbox games on the 360. They may behave as some sort of external drive or memory unit (memory card), while the emulation data for the old Xbox games demands a genuine internal drive.

[esadajr]

... if it is a fat lady...

I like fat ladies

[ClodBuster]

What about these lovely ones?

[esadajr]