Help! Why does my Hard drive activity light stay on???

[Brutuskend]

I was watching a DVD lastnight on my windows XP Pro install and all of a sudden it stopped playing. At the same time my hard drive light came on. Now it continues to stay on..

Anyone know why this might happen?

 

[TheWart]

lame but standard question: what else is running in teh background? dvd decoding takes a lot of cpu work, strange that it seems to only go on when the dvd is stopped. is your computer fnctionning properly now since the crash? i would also recommend a good reboot to clean things up. file sharing utilities in teh background, or scheduled antivirus scans would be my next guess.

 

[DaiShan]

check to make sure a cable didn't come partially loose, electronic components are subject to "chip creep" the heating and cooling causes expanding and contracting which can cause something like a cable to come loose, check all ide cables, then I would check the wire from the led to the motherboard, maybe it came a little loose? also have you restarted? does everything else work ok? Virus checker isn't running is it (had to ask )

 

[geekender]

How much ram do you have? Also, what type of video card/dvd decoder? Sounds like the OS is paging because of a lack of memory.

 

[Brutuskend]

I have 768 Megs of ram.
Running Dual 750's (P3's)@863 in XP Pro
Just to make SURE I just booted into 2000 Pro (Typing from it now) and in 2000 the drive light is OUT.
I'm wondering if this problem (in XP Pro) has anything to do with WINDOWS XP not seeing one of my CD roms?
I'm running two raid 0 setups (two Maxtor 20's on one and two IBM 15's on the other) off my onboard IDE's as well as a a 75 giger for storage (off one of the onboard ATA 100 IDE's) off the second ATA 100 IDE's I'm running a 52x cdrom and a DVD rom, and I have a Promise ATA 66 PCI card running my burner. The 52x CD rom doesn't show up in XP (something about XP only being able to recognize a certain number of IDE's)

Maybe XP is struggling with the extra IDE?

BTW: I'm running a ABIT Vp-6 dualie board....

Edit: By the way I rebooted several times into XP (both cold and quick and dirty) and each time the drive light stayed on after everything was up and running.
Everything seem's to be running normal in 2000 Pro now though.

 

[AKA]

Go into taskmanager and look at processes. What is running.. anything at a high cpu rate?

Go into msconfig and disable all startups.. restart. Does that make a difference?

Even do you services if the above doesn't work.. alot of things wont work.. but its only to narrow down what might be the problem.