Why is my HDD activity light always blinking? Help Please- FIXED FINALLY

[Peabody]

I am running Windows XP Home and my hdd activity outside case light is always blinking and indicating some type of hdd activity, even when I am not at the computer. I have disabled "Indexing" and several other "Services" to no avail. Anyone have any suggestions or links that I might try. Thanks


SEE FIX IN POST BELOW

 

[Nirvana1979]

Your hard drive might be thrasing, meaning you need more RAM. When programs run out of main memory, windows uses the hard drive as virtual memory and swaps stuff in and out. This could be the case with your computer.

 

[amdskip]

see whats running on your computer, could be a virus

 

[Peabody]

I have 512 MB DDR memory and I have run my anti-virus program and detected no viruses.

 

[AbsolutDealage]

Check out your resource monitor. Is your processor maxing out as well?

Have you recently installed some software, or a new piece of hardware?

 

[boomerang]

Disable indexing on your drive. Right click on your drive in My Computer and choose properties. Uncheck "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching".

A nice little "feature" of XP.

 

[Davegod]

Also try disabling the antivirus for a min just to see. After that, head into task manager and see whats running. If nothing stands out as suspect, start end-tasking anything unfamiliar and see what the hdd led does. A list/description of XP services an be found here (a good guide for XP service tweakage btw) although if it isnt listed there doesnt necessarily mean some rouge nasty app. xp's autoupdate worth setting to manual maybe...

For spyware removal, try a search for Spybot Search & Destroy - like AdAware but this one is still being updated Also saw some places giving a link to a tweak3d article on spyware removal recently

BTW does it do it when not online?

 

[Peabody]

Thanks Davegod. I have tried all of that to no avail and yes, it does it when I am offline or online.

 

[Lorne]

I had same problem but I checked and it was one pin off from the right ones.

 

[KingofFah]

That will do it. Is there any software that can show the hdd usage.
Maybe you could run Winbench and see if you are getting very low scores.

 

[csims]

Liteon cd burners will sometimes cause this to happen, disable autoinsert autoplay for cd rom drives may fix it.

 

[Peabody]

Thanks csims. I disabled my Lite-on CDR-W and it still does it though. I am going into my case this week end to see if maybe I have the LED wiring connected to the mobo correctly.

 

[UF Jspec]

When I miswired my LED lights, the light stayed on all the time. Maybe yours blinks.

Can you hear the HD making any noise at all?

 

[Peabody]

Hard Drive makes no noise that I can hear. I hope it turns out to be the LED wiring to the mobo. Damn thing seems to be possessed or something.

 

[csims]

Didn't mean disable the cd writer, got to disable autoplay autoinsert. See this thread
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?s=8a648769b8f0fd98321374d7d922165e&threadid=61346

 

[Peabody]

Thanks, csims. That fixed it. YaHooooooo. I went to that link you gave above and since I have Windows XP, I had to edit the registry. Thanks again and I hope this thread may help others if they have the same problem.



Here is a link for the lazy.