Gateway laptop - whirring, buzzing sound

Could be either the cooling fan or even your hard drive. I have had hard drives make this noise when they are just about to crash.

F10 is compaq open setup restore defaults F10 save changes. If you get blue screen open task manager using ctrl-alt-del to get task manager/new task config ok. don't put anything in password. Good luck.

Check if the sound is still there after disconnecting hard drive. If no that means its the hard drive which going to be more noisy with the time, or is damaged

hi Ivandbafc.
this is what i have found out.
If your hard drive is displaying any of these symptoms it is important to stop using your drive immediately, Ongoing use of a drive with these symptoms will result in irrecoverable damage being caused to the media.

• Hard drive producing a clicking sound.
• Hard drive producing a clunking sounds.
• Hard drive making buzzing sounds.
• Hard drive making a grinding sound.
• Its best you try and save all data to another drive asap.

This depends on what type of "noise" it is making. If it is a "whirring or whining" sound, then chances are that it is ok. You may want to make sure that it is not overheating, though. But if it makes "clicking" sound.... chances are that it is going bad and should be replaced. Be sure to back up your data as soon as possible.

take whatever CD you have out of the CD/DVD drive. You might have the boot order set to CD first. If that's the case, it's trying to boot from your CD drive instead of your hard drive.

Try this website, it is pretty good about scanning and fixing cd/dvd errors.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060

This is the CPU cooling fan.
Take it to a repair shop. Laptops cannot been worked on easily.
Without the cooling fan, the CPU will eventually die and make take the hard drive with it.

most likely sounds like your hard drive. Mine did the same thing starting that loud whirring noise and overheating a lot. i took it into geek squad at best buy and it cost 199.99 for the diagnosis of the problem and the repair ( if you want just a diagnosis its 69.99) and then had to buy a hard drive ( i went for the 320 GB for 109.99) and they installed it for free same day in and out. took the whole process about 5 hours on a friday afternoon.

This is normal.. It is keeping your computer cool when it gets too hot.

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