[bountyhunter]

I have a Mac 7350 Workgroup Server machine that has been reliable until yesterday when it would not start. On power up, the machine came alive, the monitor was showing the typical grey screen it normally does, but that's all it would do except I could hear a loud "click" every couple of seconds.

I turned it off for a few minutes and retried, same thing. Tried again about six times and gave up.

A couple of hours later I was ready to check more thoroughly and hit the start button and it came up normally. It has started normally three times again, can't repeat the problem.

1) I know clicking may be a hard drive, does this sound like a hard drive problem? The screen did not display the frownie face, there was no face at all just the usual grey screen.

2) Do the power supplies have internal relays that repeatedly click to disconnect a load when overloaded like a motherboard failure or some other circuit failure?

thanks

[Lateralus]

Well, the easiest way to tell would be to simply disconnect the hard drive entirely and see if you still hear the click on power up.

Swapping in another drive, formatted/OS'd or not, should also tell you.

[bountyhunter]

Yeah, I have another drive and had gotten it to go install it when the problem vanished as suddenly as it appeared. Intermittent problems are the worst.

[P]

Strongly recommend that you backup now and replace the HD after that.