Continuous hard drive activity problem.

[John Corliss]

First of all, if this is the wrong group, please point me in the right
direction.

Now on to the problem:

I just put a new ASRock K7VT4A PRO motherboard in a friend's computer
(512 MB, AMD Athlon XP 1600+ CPU, Western Digital WD400BB-00DEA0 model
40 GB HD) and installed XP Home on it. Then I updated the OS to SP2 and
installed all critical updates possible.

At some point, I noticed that the hard drive light flickers about every
second. Not only that, but the activity happens if I boot to Safe Mode.
It doesn't do it while I'm in the BIOS though.

AAARRRGHHH!

Other than the continual flickering of the light, the computer runs
okay, but *MY* computer is running the same OS and the hard drive light
doesn't flicker unless it's doing something.

Here's what I've done to try to stop the hard drive light activity in my
friend's computer:

I've turned off all tasks and file indexing, made no difference.

I don't have MS Office installed on it.

After configuring the Task Manager's "Processes" tab to show all I/O
reads and writes, I looked to see what's causing it but it didn't show
anything. Sysinternal's Process Monitor doesn't show anything going on
either.

I turned of Auto-Insert Notification, but it didn't stop light from
flashing.

I checked for rootkits, but found none (not that the computer should be
infected, what with a fresh install and all.)

I've probably done a few other things which I'm forgetting too.

Guess it's time to start killing unneeded services but frankly, I don't
expect that to do any good since the problem still occurs in Safe Mode.

Does anybody have any other ideas as to what's causing this? I'm
snatching myself bald with this problem!

NOTE: Please don't tell me that it's normal or acceptable, and to put up
with it or suggest putting electrical tape over the light. I'm sorry,
but I will ignore any such replies because IMO the hard drive light
flickering can also be a sign of malware activity (although not in this
case). Because of this, it's a good idea to have nothing non-malware
related causing it to flicker all the time when the computer is idle.

TIA.

 

[peter]

anti virus running??
peter

 

[DL]

Checked the hd, using that hd manu checking utility?
I note from your other post that Process Monitor found nothing

 

[Twayne]

First of all, if this is the wrong group, please point me in the right

direction.

Now on to the problem:

I just put a new ASRock K7VT4A PRO motherboard in a friend's computer
(512 MB, AMD Athlon XP 1600+ CPU, Western Digital WD400BB-00DEA0 model
40 GB HD) and installed XP Home on it. Then I updated the OS to SP2
and installed all critical updates possible.

At some point, I noticed that the hard drive light flickers about
every second. Not only that, but the activity happens if I boot to
Safe Mode. It doesn't do it while I'm in the BIOS though.

AAARRRGHHH!

Other than the continual flickering of the light, the computer runs
okay, but *MY* computer is running the same OS and the hard drive
light doesn't flicker unless it's doing something.

Here's what I've done to try to stop the hard drive light activity in
my friend's computer:

I've turned off all tasks and file indexing, made no difference.

I don't have MS Office installed on it.

After configuring the Task Manager's "Processes" tab to show all I/O
reads and writes, I looked to see what's causing it but it didn't show
anything. Sysinternal's Process Monitor doesn't show anything going on
either.

I turned of Auto-Insert Notification, but it didn't stop light from
flashing.

I checked for rootkits, but found none (not that the computer should
be infected, what with a fresh install and all.)

I've probably done a few other things which I'm forgetting too.

Guess it's time to start killing unneeded services but frankly, I
don't expect that to do any good since the problem still occurs in
Safe Mode.
Does anybody have any other ideas as to what's causing this? I'm
snatching myself bald with this problem!

NOTE: Please don't tell me that it's normal or acceptable, and to put
up with it or suggest putting electrical tape over the light. I'm
sorry, but I will ignore any such replies because IMO the hard drive
light flickering can also be a sign of malware activity (although not
in this case). Because of this, it's a good idea to have nothing
non-malware related causing it to flicker all the time when the
computer is idle.
TIA.

Set to do backgfound defrags?

--
Twayne

Tired of MS Office and their shananigans?
Try this free replacement:
http://www.openoffice.org

 

[John Corliss]

Set to do backgfound defrags?

Thanks for resonding.

Not sure where there is a setting for background defrags, although that
is a good hunch. At this point though, I have the Task Scheduler turned
off. Made no difference. Also, there are no tasks listed, and I have the
TS set to show hidden tasks. There are none.

 

[John Corliss]

In this case, that woul be WD's "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows".
I'll check it out.

However, I'm leaning toward the problem being either a Windows thing OR
a motherboard problem (GOD I hope it's not the latter!)

Checked the hd, using that hd manu checking utility?
I note from your other post that Process Monitor found nothing

Not sure which other post you're referring to, but you're correct. PM
didn't show anything that was causing the activity.

 

[John Corliss]

Well, I checked it out and it gave me lots of info about the hard drive,
also told me that it's running fine and has no problems. However, no
real-time monitoring.

Guess I'll have to keep looking, DL. Or maybe you or somebody else in
this group has another lead?

Thanks for replying.