XP Disk thrashing

[IanF]

My nearly new system has a very quiet Maxtor 120GByte hard drive which has
suddenly become very noisy on boot-up.

Windows installs OK, to the stage at which the desktop has finished and all
tasks are shown in the system tray. THEN the disk gets very noisy and I
have no idea what the system is doing to make this noise. In addition
Windows is taking approx. thirty seconds to close down; the systems sits for
most of this period with no apparent disk activity going on.

Can anyone please point me towards a solution??

System:

Windows XP Home
CPU Intel 2.66GHz Pentium 4, 512MBytes RAM on a Platinix 2PE/800
Mainboard
Maxtor 120Gbyte 7200 hard drive.

Thanks,

IanF

 

[Papa]

Perhaps you have a CD disk in the CD drive. Sometimes they can be pretty
noisy, and that drive will be queried during bootup.

 

[CWatters]

The HD on my PC started doing something similar - typically a few mins after
booting - then the HD failed. It might be a good time to back up all data to
CD? On the other hand my wifes machine made a similar noise - but that
turned out to be the filter on her HD cooler.

 

[CWatters]

Have a look at the "event log" to see if there is anything in there that
explains why it takes so long to shut down.

 

[IanF]

No, the event log is not showing anything out of the ordinary. I switched
the PC on this morning and it was back to being a quiet machine again. Y

esterday evening I un-installed a piece of CD Data recovery software just
before shutting down for the day. This software appears to bypass part of
the operating system and may have been involved in the problem. When I feel
brave enough I will re-install the app and see if the same thing happens.
Thanks for your help All.

IanF