Something is "ticking" my hard drive LED.

squeaky

OK... my hard drives are silent. They are both very quiet and I cannot actually "hear" any disk access noises.

The "ticking" was the best way I could think of to describe the effect. Rather like the ticking of the LED/LCD dots denoting the seconds in a digital clock display.

Also, further up the thread I said that I had watched processes live with task manager set at full screen and had added the columns for I/O reads and I/O writes and had watched those.

Some of the processes were zero (because I wasn't runnung ANY programs) while some were non zero but not changing.

The ONLY processes showing activity were:-

1. lsass.exe - very busy *
2. csrss.exe - quite busy

* I don't know what the I/O Other tab is watching but lsass is twice as busy there as for reads and writes.


Now I'm on low load, only firefox loaded; and lsass is still busy, csrss has gone quiet and one of the svchosts is slowly couning up.

GDI objects, User Objects, and handles are all stable.

squeaky

Jaffa. wrote: »

So much for Sunny Suffolk then :ps

Over the last couple of weeks, (three even) there have been a lot of days with rain forecast. It's rained on only two!
I know that it takes 5mm of rain to fill my water butt. I've been using the water up as fast as it arrives in the butt (actually out in the rain watering the garden!) to make sure that I got every drop and none bypassed the barrel because it was full. I've had a grand total of 2.5 barrel's worth - which works out to 1.25 cm of rain.

squeaky

Jaffa. wrote: »

.. er what are the jumpers set to on all the drives? You could try them all on cable select

You want me to unbolt all four drives so that I can physically get at (and see) the settings to make them all cable select? And do it again to put them all back if it makes no diferrence or the computer doesn't like it?

squeaky

Jaffa. wrote: »

I guess squeaky could run a chkdsk on the drive(s)? That would highlight any bad sectors, a tale tale sign of a dying disk.

It will be interesting to see what the cause is though

Check disk, schmeckdisk, - done chkdisk with windows own and other disk utilities. No problems shown, no bits and bobs of files recovered, no sectors repaired. Clean and healthy - both of them.

Atapi master HD

Atapi slave DVD

IDE master HD

IDE slave DVD

No CD's in either DVD drive - no flashing of DVD leds. Only the HD led.

squeaky

OK - did the old engineers "listening inside a machine trick". Placed the tip of a screwdriver on the casing of each drive and put my ear against the handle.

No "ticking" on drive D.

C is very VERY quiet in operation, I put explorer on a search for a non existent file and could hear the disk access. Once done I listened for the "ticking". It's very quiet, very brief - almost on the edge of "did I hear something or did I not" - but it's there. So "something" is accessing my drive.

At one a second that's going to make 86,400 per day! I wonder how long the drive will last?

Paradigm

squeaky wrote: »

OK... my hard drives are silent. They are both very quiet and I cannot actually "hear" any disk access noises.

The "ticking" was the best way I could think of to describe the effect. Rather like the ticking of the LED/LCD dots denoting the seconds in a digital clock display.

Apologies. I must learn to read threads & not just "skim"

squeaky wrote: »

With the two DVD drives pulled (one IDE one ATAPI) the ticking has pretty much stopped (after the main drive activity) I get a few "ticks" three to five seconds apart before it dies down. But the hard drive led is very faintly lit.

This is interesting..... is "Autoplay" turned on for the DVD drives? If so try turning it off.
I can't remember if this can be done through the drives properties or not but "TweakUI" will do it.

I'm just wondering if the drives are being polled for status change I.E Disc insertion.

Just a thought

squeaky

I think, somehow, that just "changed" my problem. I'm definitely getting something accessing drive c: which is the non IDE one which came with my new system box.

When it does it in Safe Mode and with programs other than the standard Win XP Home sp3 installation done it's got to be "deep" in the system somewhere or related to my new box.

squeaky

Paradigm wrote: »

This is interesting..... is "Autoplay" turned on for the DVD drives? If so try turning it off.
I can't remember if this can be done through the drives properties or not but "TweakUI" will do it.

I'm just wondering if the drives are being polled for status change I.E Disc insertion.

Just a thought

Autoplay has been set to differing things but... I say again - the DVD drives lights are NOT "ticking".

ONLY the HD led and by ear ONLY for drive C:

Jaffa.

It could be something to do with checking to see if the disk is still there... You might have to set them up manually in the BIOS. It's just another guess though.

squeaky

Done the auto set-up and then went through each one to MAKE it check.

Which is where I noticed that...

My master HD and my master DVD are both ATA serial devices.

They are LISTED in my bios (Fox) as IDE !!!???

AND... whenever I put a CD into the master DVD drive the processor fan goes beserk. Not just top speed but lumpy the way a car does when it's mssing a cyclinder.

If I put a CD into my slave IDE DVD drive - the processor fan behaves as I would expect.

So... at last... some real clues, however slight.

Any ideas now...?

Ain't this FUN?