Hard Drive Keeps Spinning?

[fighterpilot]

I have a WD Caviar 80GB SATA Hard Drive connected to my ABIT NF7-S motherboard. I am running Windows XP SP2.

Many times lately, whenever I go to open internet explorer, windows explorer, or just opening a folder the hard drive spins/reads (HD light on) constantly. I have run McAfee virus scan (up to date), Trend Micro Housecall online virus scan, Ad Aware, and Spybot showing no issues there. I also did a chkdsk and everything checks out ok.

The application that causes the HD to spin usually hangs, while I can access other applications.

What might this problem be? I plan on reformatting soon, but would like to diagnose the issue before I do so to make sure it isn't a hard drive problem.

Thanks for any assistance everyone can offer.

 

[Bona Fide]

Lack of RAM? Defragment?

 

[fighterpilot]

I should have mentioned too that I have 2x512MB of DDR400, AthlonXP 2600+, GeForce Ti4200. And I have defragmented multiple times using both Windows defrag but I tend to use PerfectDisk. I do have my system paging file set to 1.5GB (set by Windows) and have tried setting it myself to no avail.

It gets annoying when I go to open a video file and the hard drive just spins incessently taking forever just to load a 20MB file.

Oh well, I guess I will be reformatting this weekend and see how things go.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Hmm
My thought is there might be some errors that chkdsk didn't pick up
What flag did you use for chkdsk? /f?
If you have time you might like a surface scan to find bad sectors. (it should be chkdsk c: /r to check bad sectors) Mainly they are the cause for this kind of behaviour

 

[fighterpilot]

Originally posted by: AnnihilatorX
Hmm
My thought is there might be some errors that chkdsk didn't pick up
What flag did you use for chkdsk? /f?
If you have time you might like a surface scan to find bad sectors. (it should be chkdsk c: /r to check bad sectors) Mainly they are the cause for this kind of behaviour

Thanks. Yes, I did a chkdsk /f and found nothing. I will do a chkdsk /r tonight when I leave for bed to see if it picks anything up.