Windows 8.1 - system / ntoskrnl using 100% HDD

[Pawnless Endgame]

Anything from changing the sound volume (see attached pic), alt-tabbing, opening a Firefox tab, opening a folder in Explorer and even hitting "preview post" on this forum will invoke hard disk activity LED for several seconds and I normally can't move the cursor when that happens. Task Manager lists "system" as the culprit whenever this happens. When I hit properties on system, it lists itself as ntoskrnl. Resource Monitor lists several instances of pagefile.sys. Have tried the following:

1. Chkdsk, which is the most obvious if it's a dying hard disk, but Chkdsk came back negative.

2. Disabled the page file, no difference, so re-enabled it.

3. Re-extracted Firefox (portable version btw), tried Chrome and Internet Exploder... still the same.

Any pointers please, that would be grand! I can't go inside the PC to check S-ATA cables etc as it's NHS property until I've paid it off fully in 2 years time. Plus, it's an all-in-one PC, so I'm not sure how to get inside one of those anyway

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

Thanks guys.

Nightmare - I totally forgot about Seatools. That was the hard drive diagnostic that we used to run back in my 1st-line days. Should have remembered that! Anyway, tried it, and again it came back negative.

Bledd - Event Viewer > System tab listed a few instances of DistributedCOM (ID 10010) and 1 single instance of Service Control Manager (ID 7030). The rest were 12,000-odd "information" line items only.

The hard drive crunching issue has gone away now, but something seemed to have knocked out my touchscreen driver, so I think I'll do a recovery / rollback as it does seem to be an OS issue.

Thanks again

 

[Pawnless Endgame]

Another update: refreshing the USB stack seemed to have resolved the lack of touchscreen input. That's going into Device Manager, Universal Serial Bus Controller sub-tree, trashing everything in there. Power off using the I/O button as you'll temporarily won't have kb/mouse. Boot the baby back up and Bob's your uncle. Although it's an AIO PC, Device Manager still counted the touchscreen as a USB device.