Hard drive doesn't stop running...

[tkistre]

My friend has a Toshiba Satellite Laptop. It has 512mb memory, P4 2.2ghz CPU, 40gb hard drive and Windows XP Pro. He noticed a few weeks ago it was starting to run slower than normal. He cleared the temp folders, ran spyware and virus checks and didn't find much of anything. After these things didn't help, he noticed the hard drive light continously blinked. I looked at it today. The light does continously blink. He has over 25gb free space, only needed things in startup. I went through the registry and everything looked good in the RUN folders. I looked at Task Manager and everything running is legit, about 32 processes. The CPU usage sits at 0-5%, nothing running crazy. If you boot into Safe Mode with only the mininum running, the light still continously blinks.

I didn't have any ideas off hand, aside from the hard drive possibly having a problem, although he hasn't had any of the regular symptons I'm used to seeing of a hard drive going bad. Does anyone have any suggestions to check? Thanks!

 

[Matthias99]

I had a problem with this when GoBack (a system imaging/restore program) was installed on my girlfriend's laptop. It would thrash the hard drive constantly even when the system was sitting idle at the desktop. That's about all I can think of if you've already checked for viruses/spyware.

 

[V00D00]

Is System Restore Enabled? How about anti-virus? Those two could do it. Windows may also be indexing the contents of the drive.

I would defrag it, but be sure you analyze it and see if it needs it first.

 

[tkistre]

That could very well be the problem. He does have Norton Go Back installed. When I tried to End Process in Task Manager to see if it helped, it would not allow me to. When I started it in Safe Mode, I didn't see it running, but it may be running before Windows.I was not familiar with Go Back. I'll get with him and tell him to uninstall it and see if that helps. Thanks!

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Don't blame XP for this. I've seen two 98SE machines doing the same thing. Jim

 

[tkistre]

Well, I was finally able to get a hold of him and get him to uninstall Go Disk. Even after the uninstall, the hard drive light continously blinks. I had really hoped that was it. Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[Fistandantilis]

You could always get a small piece of duct tape and cover the light so you dont see it.

 

[stevty2889]

Open up task manager and go to the processes tab. Click on view, select colomns, and check the I/O reads and I/O writes boxes. That should show you what is continuously accessing the hard drive.

 

[Jiggz]

Make sure the unit is not connected to the net or any wireless NIC is disabled. Then leave the unit on for about 24 hours and see if the hdd will stop accessing. If it doesn't stop, the hdd could be faulty. See if you can, try another hdd and do a clean install. If the same problem persists after a new XP installation, the unit could be faulty. If it stops accessing, it could be the indexing of NTFS.