Fan won't stop running

[Darkoverlordofdata]

The hard drive on my old Inspiron laptop died recently, with a slew of broken Ext4 Superblock errors. Running fsck didn't really help, it just got worse & worse. I'm retired, and don't have a lot of cash, so I improvise. I had a spare 64gb usb3.0 drive, so I formatted it like a hard drive, with a gpt partition table, etc. Then I installed linux onto this new 'drive'. It actually works well, it boots faster and programs load snappy, it's like getting an upgrade. Except...

The fan keeps coming on, and doesn't shut off. I just cleaned it, there are no dust bunnies, so I'm guessing that the cpu get's more activity now cause it doesn't have to spend so much time waiting for the hdd, and without the hdd running, the fan probably isn't getting the correct feedback.

Do you have any ideas that might help? I'm wondering if I should disconnect and remove the old hdd?

 

[Saga Lout]

Maybe I should have left this thread to our very own Darklordoftech but I'll have a shot at it.

Have you tried removing the internal hard drive? It will stlil be spinning at 5,400 rpm even though it's doing nothing. The fan is probably struggling to keep that cool while having a USB drive going all the time as well.

You could buy a USB caddy to access data from that disk externally when you need it.