Constant hard drive activity

Technojunkie

Technojunkie

Technojunkie

Associate
Joined
22 Mar 2006
Posts
46
I need some help from someone who is smarter than me.

I've got a machine in the house which stays on 24/7 and acts as a media server (and other things). I noticed last week that my OS HD was being accessed about every 2 seconds which it never did before.

This is what I've found and tried so far

No applications are running and system idle sits at 99%
Checked it for viruses and malware and it's clean.
It is'nt anything network related but I disconnected it from the Net just in case.
I've diabled just about everything from running on start-up in msconfig.
As far as I can see nothing is creating a log file.
I run "Diskmon" (from softpedia) and it tells me something is writing ( no
reading) small packets to the drive.

How the hell do I find out what it is? cos it's bugging the life out me!

Cheers

Andy

OS is XP Pro all up to date.
Mobo Gigabyte GA-K8NSC-939
Proc Athlon 3000
1Gb mem
ATi 9600
WDC WD200JD (The disk being accessed)
Spinpoint 0812C
2x 200G Deskstars in RAID
Geovision GV-1240
 
I've just watched my games machine and it's doing it about every 30 seconds, not every 2 seconds.

I'd still like to know what it is and can you stop it?... (probably not)
 
I noticed during idle (left for 2 hours) my downloader box constantly defragmented the harddrive, even when defrag wasen't open. Worked out "offline defragment/boot time defragment" needs to be disabled, can be done in Tune Up Utilities.

Your HD does access a bit, I guess depends what you have loaded, services, system restore, antivirus, if you're idling or have something loaded (torrent)
 
I had a problem like this up until now, although not strictly the same.

I found if I left my PC for more than 10 minute, it would be accessing it like I was doing a virus scan. Was doing my head in for a week, then I found out it was Windows Defender scanning my PC when I least needed it scanned. :mad: Did a search on the net and loads of people have been having the same problem.
 
You could try running Filemon, this will log every little file/dir being accessed on your PC.

Might give you an idea what exe/service is doing this!
 
Thanks folks for all the reply's.

When I get home I'll have a look at the indexing service, hibernate and restore, and I'll try running file mon.

As I said, the machine is disconnected from the net so I've disabled the firewall and virus scan, and all other applications. Acording to windows the only thing that is running........ is windows.

Keep the ideas comming


Cheers
 
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