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Constant seeking and HD Usage when idle

B

BD2003

Lifer
For some reason, my laptop will seek and write something every second. Its like a small shifting sound, and then a click. Regularly on the second. I have tried to isolate every single system process, and I cant seem to figure out what is making it do it.

Is there any way to find out what program is using the drive, and how?
 
Did you check for Spyware/Viruses etc?

Sounds like that could be a culprit.

Any idea when it started?
 
its not virii/spyware...i double scanned. Indexing is off too. So is system restore. Disable antivirus, firewall etc, does nothing. I've even went as far as to close every running process I can...still does it.

There has to be a way to find out specifically what program is writing where and when.
 
Open Task Manager and add all of the I/O columns in the "Processes" tab. Then keep a close eye on these values. Find the one that changes with large differences and quickly. The program that's doing that I/O thingamajig is most likely the culprit, but let us know what that program is, so we can also give our opinion. 😛
 
If it stops when you start using your computer again, it's the microsoft indexing service, which is used to make your files searches faster. Disable it, and then get the google desktop search tool instead.
 
The only ones that are showing any movement are lsass.exe, and explorer.exe. Very slight from svchost. Indexing is absolutely, positively 100% off. The service is disabled and it is turned off on every drive as well.

It isnt seeming to effect performance at all, but its just odd. It happens whether or not I'm idle. It makes a small shifting noise, the light blinks and something is written/read, and it does it about 10 times. Then I wont hear a peep from it for about another minute...then it starts again.

 
Neither is new. I know for a fact it is writing to the C partition. If there was a way to find out what file is being written I'm sure I could figure out what is doing it.
 
According to filemon, it isnt writing to any file in particular. It isnt writing to any file at all. But diskmon is showing write activity.

WTF?
 
ntuser.dat is a registry hive for per user settings. I don't know why it's constantly reading or writing to that file. I'm guessing the culprit is explorer.exe as you mentioned that as well. Either way, I think it's some maintenance thingie for laptops. Dunno, I have never owned a laptop, so I'm pretty much as clueless as you are now. 😛
 
I dont think its that file anymore. It was probably written to whenever I did a search, which as of that time was my only way of finding out what is being written to. I found two programs, diskmon and filemon.

Filemon shows what files are being written etc, diskmon just shows disk activity. During the culprit activity, filemon is showing nothing, but diskmon is showing writes. It is getting, really, really annoying. And its not just the sound of disk activity...there is a bit of a shifting/seeking sound before it.

I'd assume if the disk was going stupid, it wouldnt be writing information that diskmon would pick up.
 
Can you load up PerfMon, and set some counters for your PhysicalDisk drives, and check your read byte/write bytes rates?

If you get a consistent reading (or consistant zero reading), it would confirm whether or not the disk operations were because of software or drive firmware.
 
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