high disk activity

[Wendell Buckner]

My computer has suddenly gone insane. My hard drive light stays on slowing
down everything. The last thing I can remember doing before this happened
was removing the "yahoo toolbar" that my daughter had downloaded. But since
then my hard drive disk activity has been insanely high. Is there a way to
find out what process is causing this?

 

[Bullwinkle. J. Moose]

Sounds like a virus. Run a good AV product plus spybot plus ad-aware and any
other anti virus program you have in your arsenal. Then reboot a couple of
times and defrag and reboot again.

You have lots of work to clean up the disks and memory.

Good luck

 

[Wendell Buckner]

A virus is what I thought until I looked at the event viewer... It was
showing possible hardware failure with ATAPI devices including my CD ROM and
Hard drive... But since I originally thought it was a virus so I thought
that I would first patch windows with service pack 2 and etc... The other
patches seem to work but service pack 2 did not go well... I can't boot at
all now.. it says that "hal.dll" is fubar... Probably wasn't the smartest
thing to do with the system reporting failures in the event viewer...Well I
do have a spare computer so I'm going to move the drive from the faulty
computer into the secondary computer as a slave drive... where I can do a
disk defrag, virus scan and etc... then see if I can get it back into the
other computer... probably create some boot/repair floppies for XP...
anyway... right now I think the hard drive controller is bad... But I've got
some spare parts so I'll do some swapping..