Ext hardrive "active" when not?

[Peter G]

I have 3 identical external firewire HD of 160gb each, Win XP Pro - one
seems to be searching for something with lights flashing on and off, after
not being used for a few hours. I leave them on 24/7.
I've checked under disc management and it reports that this drive is
healthy but "active" when not being used. I have all 3 drives mapped on
three different computers which are on but not accessing the drives.
Any ideas what might be going on?

 

[Guest]

Windows will constantly 'poll' devices to check their status. However if
this devce is 'busy', even if no files are 'open' or if it is not being
scanned by an anti-virus application or being defragmented; then consider
doing a virus check.

'Active' doesn't refer to the drive being 'busy' in as much as it is busy
with a read or write command being executed. It describes the type of
partition. There are 3 types of partitions [or whole disks] in Xp, the
system, active, and boot partitions are marked as System, Active, or Boot,
respectively.

You cannot mark a logical drive as active.

You can only mark a partition as active on a master boot record (MBR) disk.
A computer can only have one active partition per disk.

Changing or deleting an active partition might cause your computer not to
start.
The names commonly used for partitions containing the startup and operating
system files are system and boot partitions, respectively.

The system partition must be a primary partition that has been marked as
active for startup purposes and must be located on the disk that the computer
accesses when starting up the system. There can be only one active system
partition on a disk at a time. You can have multiple basic disks and each can
have one active partition. However the computer will only start from one
specific disk. If you want to use another operating system, you must first
mark its system partition as active before restarting the computer.

 

[Treeman]

I have 3 identical external firewire HD of 160gb each, Win XP Pro - one
seems to be searching for something with lights flashing on and off,
after
not being used for a few hours. I leave them on 24/7.
I've checked under disc management and it reports that this drive is
healthy but "active" when not being used. I have all 3 drives mapped
on
three different computers which are on but not accessing the drives.
Any ideas what might be going on?

Could be the indexing service is set up on the active drive:
To open Indexing Service
Open Computer Management (Local).
In the console tree, double-click Services and Applications.
Double-click Indexing Service.

To open Computer Management, click Start, and then click Control Panel.
Double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer
Management.
Treeman