My HDD light won't stop blinking - and games won't stop hanging - how the heck can I diagnose this prob???

[Demosthenes]

This is driving me nuts. My hard drive - Hitachi 80 gigger - won't stop working. Even when I close *EVERY* application except for the bare system basics, the light still blinks every second.. obviously it's computing something.. and when I try to play Battlefield or Homeworld 2, the video will randomly hang, out of nowhere... hang for about 4 seconds, then the audio will hang for 1 second and then it will all flash back to normal. Then it'll work great for 20 seconds, then hang, and so on over and over... I've encountered this type of thing before... but never before has the origin been so elusive....

I've got the latest drivers for my GF 4, latest Hyperion 4in1 drivers, latest sound blaster live! drivers
I've checked the logs in Event Viewer over and over again, and cannot find any message correlating to the hangs...
I've scanned multiple times all of my hard drives, I don't seem to have a virus..
I've scanned multiple times all over with Ad-Aware, it doesn't seem to be any adware...
I've tried messing with my virtual memory settings, and can't seem to find anything that works..

I JUST WANT CONTROL OF MY HARD DRIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This really sucks.... especially since just the other day I finally configured my system to its full gaming potential, and now my hard drive won't cooperate. Multiple times before I've formatted and reinstalled windows to fix a little tiny problem just like this, and I won't hesitate for a moment to do it if I haven't fixed the problem when Half Life 2 comes out... but I would really really like to find a solution that lets me keep all my applications and settings.... if anyone has any ideas/suggestions I'd love to hear them... thanks.

 

[Hossenfeffer]

especially since just the other day I finally configured my system to its full gaming potential

What sort of things did you do do configure things to "full gaming potential"? Any chance of jumping back with a system restore?

 

[Demosthenes]

well hey, that's a great idea - only no matter which system restore point I try to use, going back up to a month, upon reboot it says "no changes have been made to your system because it cannot restore from this point". damn..

 

[mechBgon]

What antivirus software are you using? Are the antivirus definitions up-to-date, and is it set to scan all files (no exceptions) with full heuristics enabled? If there's a chance of a virus, you should probably disable System Restore and delete all SR files before your scan, and boot in Safe Mode to do your scan. If your software might not be very good, download a free 15-day trial of Norton Antivirus 2004.

Also, fire up ZoneAlarm and see if something's trying to get out (or in).

 

[Abhi]

Hmm.. after all you have done, i am pretty sure you tried this as well, but i might as well say it

Did you try running scandisk in thorough mode on your hard drives? Try doing a surface scan. It takes ages, but it just might work...

 

[morijuana]

Got any services running in the background you may have forgotten about? Web/ftp server perhaps? even a bittorrent or kazaa style p2p client running in minimised and in startup mode?

 

[loic2003]

viruses can cause a machine to run like crap, do a thourough scan. Also, maybe your HD is on it's way out; something that would take the drive a split second to look up may be taking longer because the bearing is knackard or something. Try running siSoft Sandra to see the speed that your drive is running at.

-Loïc