Something is "ticking" my hard drive LED.

squeaky

Hi all,

After start-up and all my software is loaded, not that there's much, the light for my hard drive flashes about once per second. Like a ticking clock.

I did an exit from each loaded program in turn, but the light kept ticking. Watching processes on the tab manager, especially CPU and, quite rightly, nothing was stirring on CPU usage or memory.

So I rebooted into safe mode and looked at task manager again. CPU and memory were both very quiet.

I finally noticed that down at the bottom of the window there was some action. Two boxes, one called Commit Charge, and the other Kernel Memory. The count in each of them was climbing. What exactly are they and should they be climbing when I have no (known) programs running?

Adaware, spybot, malaware, ccleaner, all show zero results. Hijack this looks normal to me. I'm stumped.

Have I had/got something on board with a leaky event listener (or something) that makes these numbers climb?

Win XP to SP3 fully up to date.

Jaffa.

Maybe one of your small background programs have become stuck in a loup lol Could be a catch of some sort, or indexing in the background. Might be system restore thinking about it

Strider590

Yeah you'll have hundreds of programs and processes running in the background, some you can see in the process list, some are run as services.

squeaky

OK, system restore(s) tomorrow, stepping back. I'm too tired right now and don't want to make any mistakes.

squeaky

Strider590 wrote: »

Yeah you'll have hundreds of programs and processes running in the background, some you can see in the process list, some are run as services.

Actually I wouldn't have thought so. Not in Safe Mode. There wasn't even a full screen listed in the Task Manager window.

adouglasmhor

Have you defragged etc.

squeaky

Yep.
It's a complete new install on a new machine and after loading the basics I swept it for bugs, defragged, optimised, tuned it up...

..I have been trying out a bunch of programs and, if I decided it wasn't what I wanted uninstalled and then did a disk clean and reg clean after each one.

For a bet one of them has left something behind that is causing this. However, I'm only assuming that the Commit and Kernal things are related to my "ticking" hard drive. I have no idea how to track this down. Task many, hijack this and so on don't give me any clues.

daily_2

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

If it's making a ticking sound, it could be a hard disk issue.

squeaky

Nah, sorry for the confusion but "ticking" was the best way I could think of to describe it. That's why I put it in quotes.

"SOMETHING" is accessing my hard drive for a very brief moment about once per second. At least, the light for it flashes very briefly.

Even with all loaded programs closed down it still "ticks".

In Safe Mode it still "ticks".

I've stepped back through every Restore Point that I have and it STILL "ticks".

I've had task manager open and nothing shows as changing on CPU usage when I have no programs loaded.

Watching processes I've highlighted each one in turn and for some, once every now and then you'll see the briefest flicker of the highlight as they "clock in" so to speak, and none make enough use of CPU time to move above 0%.

None of them flicker to match the drive "tick".

In stages, I guess I'm left with:-

1. Try a windows repair
2. Do a windows re-install
3. Reformat and start again from a virgin disk

<sigh>

And it was all going so well

aliEnRIK

post the hijack log so we can see whats running now

if its vista it could just be the defrag which auto runs when nothing else is happening (Or low processor usage)

daily_2

Run procmon.