Remember that beeping?

A while back I posted about how I woke up to my computer beeping at me. Couldn't find a reason, so I shut it down. Restarted and the beeping was back.
So I wound up setting up a new-to-me computer and moving stuff to that.

Yesterday the beeping started again. Which was really annoying because all that the old & new systems had in common were the hard drives. Shut it down and switched to the Linux box that I still need to get some things set up on (getting it to recognize the NAS servers, mostly).

After an hour or two, I started it up again. I got a couple beeps then they stopped. When it finished booting the desktop only had only the wastebasket icon on it. And a program was complaining about not being able to find something on drive G: Which was the external eSATA drive.

At which point I turned off the external drive and restarted it. Windows recognized it and the icons were back.

Later when the beeping started again I carefully moved the external drive close to my ear. And *it* was the source of the beeps.

Arrrgghh.

I'll dig into things more later, but at least now I know where the problem is. Might be heat problems (though the drive case isn't that warm) might be the drive failing, dunno. But at least I know where to look