I'm facing this problem, where my Sony Laptop hard drive continually makes a lound clunk and subsequently my PC will freeze for 2-3 seconds. This happens more when the drive is access more frequently.

It's an Hitachi DK23CA-20 and this problem is mentioned on quite a few forums - Sony, Dell, HP & IBM are all using this drive. The solution seems to be to upgrade the drive's firmware, and Dell have an upgrade utility, but it does not work on my drive, being from Sony. Hitachi refuse to supply the upgrade and do not acknowledge the problem. Seems like it's the manufacturers responsibility to solve the problem.

HP users seem to be able to use the Dell upgrade, but some need to edit the configuration files to include their current drive firmware in order for it to upgrade. To do this, you must know your drive's current firmware version, which I don't.

1, Has anyone faced the same problem and managed to perform the upgrade?

2, Does anyone know how to find out the firmware version on a DK23CA-20 hard disk?