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[paulr]

A while back I was having some pretty serious sound quality issues.  After much research and BIOS/Driver changing, among other things, the issue went away.  I thought one of the drivers I had updated to had fixed it, but I was wrong.

Last night, I was running out of disk space.  Last time this happened, I found a 250GB Maxtor on sale locally and bought it.  In order to install it, I had to remove another hard drvie.  I did some shuffling around and thought I had the largest drives installed.  It turns out that instead of a 40GB drive, I had put back in a 20GB drive.  So, I pulled the 20GB and put in the 40GB drive.

As soon as I booted the computer, I was slammed with a huge amount of static coming from my speakers.  I opened the nForce control panel, and it was registering zero sound.  Somehow this 40GB drive was causing noise in my speakers...  Noise that was not going through my sound subsystem.  I realized all the frustration I had before with the noise was actually caused by this hard disk.

I rebooted a few times and the noise continued.  I pulled the disk out and reinstalled the 20GB drive, and the noise went away.

Very strange!  Does anyone have a similar experience?  Is there a way to "fix" it?

[xen-uno]

I don't think there's any way for noise produced electrically (by the drive) to get back to the sound card (and if there was, it would cause a smorgasboard of other problems). Disconnect the IDE cable (but leave the power hooked up) and turn her on. My bet is that you'll still get noise...which means the drive is putting out something in the radio frequency range and thus...is defective.

10^-27

[AnalogRoaming]

I don't think there's any way for noise produced electrically (by the drive) to get back to the sound card (and if there was, it would cause a smorgasboard of other problems). Disconnect the IDE cable (but leave the power hooked up) and turn her on. My bet is that you'll still get noise...which means the drive is putting out something in the radio frequency range and thus...is defective.

10^-27

Sure there is. My SBLive used to pick up noise from inside of my case. Any time the drive spun, believe me, you'd hear it.  

It's generally caused by a cable connected to the sound card that acts as a receiving antenna. You can usually find it in systems that have an audio loopback cable connecting either one sound card to another, or a tv card (Hauppage WinTV) that goes into a soundcard line in.  Internal loops can cause it too.  

In my case, I replaced the live card with an older AWE64 Gold and my problems went away.  

Also, check to see what INPUTS are on in your sound card's mixer.  Some cards don't show all of the mixer inputs unless you tell it to.  Turning some of those off might also help. It did for me.