Constant HDD chatter driving me nuts!

[paul]

I hope somebody can help me with this, I have an incredibly annoying
hard-drive chatter that I just can't pin down, and it's driving me
nuts ! Here's the details:

When it first appeared, I was convinced it was the pagefile. It was
located on my system drive, so I moved it to a physical second HDD,
and resized it (made it much larger, 1Gb - 2Gb). This cured it for a
day, but it soon came back. I resized again, this time much smaller
(250Mb - 1Gb), and again this seemed to cure it, but, it's back again
! The best way to describe it is like a grasshopper constantly
chirping away, even when I am not doing anything. I'm still fairly
sure it must be the pagefile, but I can't think why.

My setup is Athlon XP 2000, XP Home SP1, 512Mb RAM (DDR), 60Gb+40Gb
HDD, pagefile 250Mb - 1Gb, Sophos AV, ZoneAlarm Free Vsn, .NET
framework. The Indexing service is disabled, and RegMOn, FileMon and
DiskMon do not give me any answers. Stopping the AV and firewall make
no difference.
Rebooting the PC makes no difference.

Anybody ... ?

Thanks, Paul Phillips

 

[GSV Three Minds in a Can]

I hope somebody can help me with this, I have an incredibly annoying
hard-drive chatter that I just can't pin down, and it's driving me
nuts ! Here's the details:

When it first appeared, I was convinced it was the pagefile. It was
located on my system drive, so I moved it to a physical second HDD,
and resized it (made it much larger, 1Gb - 2Gb). This cured it for a
day, but it soon came back. I resized again, this time much smaller
(250Mb - 1Gb), and again this seemed to cure it, but, it's back again
! The best way to describe it is like a grasshopper constantly
chirping away, even when I am not doing anything. I'm still fairly
sure it must be the pagefile, but I can't think why.

My setup is Athlon XP 2000, XP Home SP1, 512Mb RAM (DDR), 60Gb+40Gb
HDD, pagefile 250Mb - 1Gb, Sophos AV, ZoneAlarm Free Vsn, .NET
framework. The Indexing service is disabled, and RegMOn, FileMon and
DiskMon do not give me any answers. Stopping the AV and firewall make
no difference.
Rebooting the PC makes no difference.

Anybody ... ?

The only think I can think of (given that you have turned CISVC off) is
that XP will, during 'idle time' do some limited defrag of the disk
(based on the prefetch info). There should be no pagefile activity if
the system is idle.

You could examine this hypothesis by ensuring the system doesn't
actually get to idle (running something like SETI@Home, or Prime95, will
keep the cpu busy, and a lot of XPs housekeeping tasks won't ever get to
run).

If you have MS Office installed, I assume you have nailed 'FindFast' or
whatever the Office equivalent of CISVC is called?

Final thought - if you have SMART turned on, with self tests requested,
the disk may be doing it all on its own .. no intervention by the OS
required. However disk seeks should not be loud enough to be annoying,
unless you have a really quiet office/machine .. or unless your disk is
wearing out. 8<,

 

[paul]

Thanks for replying - the disk itself (w/ the pagefile on it) is
fairly new.
Can you tell me - what is SMART ? Where do I need to check for this ?
Also, I know this is really thick but I'm not sure where to look for
Findfast (I do have Office 2000 installed).

Thanks again,

Paul

 

[GSV Three Minds in a Can]

Thanks for replying - the disk itself (w/ the pagefile on it) is
fairly new.
Can you tell me - what is SMART ? Where do I need to check for this ?
Also, I know this is really thick but I'm not sure where to look for
Findfast (I do have Office 2000 installed).

SMART is the hard disk self-monitoring firmware. You normally have to
tell your BIOS to turn it on (there is a small performance hit), and
most (at least most IDE) disk drives don't do the self-testing unless
you ask them (because it can interfere with real disk requests from the
PC). If you want to check your disk's SMART status, the easiest thing is
probably to use www.aida32.hu (free), which does other stuff as well.

Findfast should, iirc, have an entry on the control panel somewhere - at
least the Office97 version did. If it's running it builds index files
called ffastun*.* (*=various) which you should be able to find with a
search (but they're probably hidden & system files, so you'd need to
turn those options on, under advanced search). The actual executables
are called 'findfast.*'

 

[rodolfnose]

SMART is accessed though the BIOS, Esc, F2, etc, when starting the machine.
SMART when on, constantly checks disk for error, and tries to correct them
automatically.

 

[paul]

Well... thanks guys, but it's still there. I have disabled SMART in
the Bios (although Aida32 is still reporting some kind of numbers for
it ??). Findfast*.* is nowhere to be found. I don't know if it is
significant or not, but the noise manifests itself for a while and
then disappears and comes back.

Is there any kind of low-level free disk monitoring tool out there
that might yield the answer ? (have tried Sysinternals DiskMon and
FileMon).

 

[GSV Three Minds in a Can]

Well... thanks guys, but it's still there. I have disabled SMART in
the Bios (although Aida32 is still reporting some kind of numbers for
it ??). Findfast*.* is nowhere to be found. I don't know if it is
significant or not, but the noise manifests itself for a while and
then disappears and comes back.

Is there any kind of low-level free disk monitoring tool out there
that might yield the answer ? (have tried Sysinternals DiskMon and
FileMon).
snip>

I don't know one that would catch all disk activity .. probably there is
one somewhere. Did you try asking your disk manufacturer? (who was it,
by the way?).

Did you also try the 'keep the cpu busy', just to see if it is some sort
of 'run when idle' task in the OS?

I guess Task manager might at least show which process(es) are clocking
up IO operations?

 

[paul]

well thanks for your help guys - i did think I had it licked last
weekend, but it's back with a vengence. have downloaded a Seagate
utility, will try and run diagnostics this weekend. haven't tried the
'keep cpu busy' yet, and task mgr doesn't really give any clues.