HELP! Hard drive light flashing all the time, even when not in use!

[WAZ]

This has just started recently, actually.

It's not a steady "reading" as would happen with the Windows XP Indexing Service (which I have disabled anyway). It's more of a "pulsing" about every second.

I have completely disabled all Anti-Virus Auto-Protect stuff, turned off/disabled Norton Protected Recycle Bin, and unchecked ALL Startup items in msconfig. I've also gone through services.msc and disabled many which I know can be turned off (again, Indexing is one I disabled, along with about 10 others).

I read that the hard drive light doing that could be a sign of a virus infection. I have completely updated my virus definitions; a full system scan reveals no infection. And other Norton system checks are also clean.

I have defragged my hard drive and turned off all running programs -- there's nothing in my system tray, and it's just sitting at my desktop. Yet, from the moment Windows boots, the hard drive light pulses.

If anyone knows what might be going on (or better yet, how to fix it ), that would be great.

Thanks!

 

[WAZ]

By the way, since I'm not an expert on what should and shouldn't be running, here's a list of what's running in my Task Manager (along with User Name) in Windows XP. Perhaps something here shouldn't be?

taskmgr.exe (WAZ)
SPOOLSV.EXE (SYSTEM)
iexplorer.exe (WAZ)
EXPLORER.EXE (WAZ)
SVCHOST.EXE (LOCAL SERVICE)
SVCHOST.EXE (NETWORK SERVICE)
SVCHOST.EXE (SYSTEM)
SVCHOST.EXE (SYSTEM)
devldr32.exe (WAZ)
LSASS.EXE (SYSTEM)
SERVICES.EXE (SYSTEM)
WINLOGON.EXE (SYSTEM)
CSRSS.EXE (SYSTEM)
SMSS.EXE (SYSTEM)
System (SYSTEM)
System Idle Process (SYSTEM)

Yes, SVCHOST is listed twice under "SYSTEM" -- one using 15,264 K of memory, and the other 2,728 K. Is this normal?

Thanks again.

 

[308nato]

Try disabling autoplay under device manager for all your cd/cdrw's.

 

[BFG10K]

If the primary channel is shared by more than one device then the LED will light up when either of them is in use. As for HD activity Windows is constantly adjusting its pagefile even with no programs running so it's very likely to be normal.

Mine has pretty much always done this so maybe you just didn't notice it before.