Troubleshooting excessive disk accesses

[jim_bowery]

I've got a system that is continually bogged down doing disk accesses
while there is very little CPU usage and 50M to 100M free memory from a
total of 512M. BTW: My Computer->Properties reports "384MB of RAM
Physical Address Extension" which is consistent with Windows Task
Manager->Performance->Physical Memory->Total, whereas Startup->All
Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System Information->System
Summary->Total Physical Memory reports (after 2 minutes of waiting)
512.00 MB.

Windows Task Manager provides some per-process information by selecting
columns for VM, I/O counts and page faults (there are no deltas for I/O
-- just for page faults) but there are a couple of problems with it:

1) Unlike CPU, there is no way to know what percent capacity of total
disk bandwidth is being used because there is no benchmark of the disk
system benchmark using the same metrics as Windows Task Manager. I'm
suspicious that these disk accesses are coming from something weird
like a buggy file system filter driver that is multiplying the I/O like
an order of magnitude for all processes.

2) The WTM memory numbers don't add up. When I sum together all the
memory use of the processes, it doesn't come close to the "Physical
Memory (K)" "Total" figure, no even when adding in the "Kernel Memory".
Same for Virtual Memory.

 

[MBI]

I've got a system that is continually bogged down doing disk accesses

while there is very little CPU usage and 50M to 100M free memory from a
total of 512M.

It may be nothing more that a loose cable or HD. I had a similar
condition with a laptop, finally stopped working altogether with Black
SOD. A warranty tech talked me through removing the HD ( unplugged
system and removed battery first) then reseating the HD (just shoved it
back in). System booted up and the problem was gone. Been fine ever
since. Try reseating your HD, or HD cable, if a desktop system.