Strange hard drive activity - for no aparent reason

[Nate420]

Running Windows XP Pro W/ all updates.


Not sure how long this has been going on, but I just noticed that my HDD light is constantly flashing as if something is accessing the disk, but it does it right after a fresh boot sitting at desktop. It's flashing at about a 1 second interval. I've run Ad-Aware to see if anyone else in the house had been pr0n surfing and ended up d/ling junk, but it found nothing(latest reflist) and I run Norton AV 2002 in auto-protect always.(I know that no AV is perfect) Could this just be some strange XP bug that I just never noticed? A virus maybe? I'm at a loss on this one. Whatever is causing it isn't using any CPU time according to Task Manager.

Anyone have an idea? Any guesses?


Sys:
Win XP Pro
Asus CUSL2-C
P3 1Ghz
512Mb Crucial PC133 CAS2
SB Live X-Gamer 5.1
Gainward G3
2x IBM 60GXP 40G 7200

 

[NogginBoink]

Nate,

You'll probably have to chalk it up as Just One Of Those Things.

The W2K/XP OS is always accessing the drive for one reason or another. It's probably perfectly normal.

If you want to track it down, you can try filemon from www.sysinternals.com to get deeper into it.

-Noggin

 

[Nate420]

Thanks Noggin....

I downloaded FileMon and it shows that most of the access is from SVCHOST.EXE:740 and SYSTEM:4.

From the looks of the files that are being accessed it seems harmless, files such as:
windows\system32\wbem\repository\fs\objects.data
windows\system32\wbem\repository\fs\roll_forward
windows\system32\rpcss.dll

Can anyone running Win XP Pro confirm that your pc is acting similar? It just seems strange that I never noticed the HDD LED flashing like it is before now.

 

[CSoup]

Yes, any windows NT based operating system will constantly access the hard disk for no reason. Nothing you can do about it.

 

[Dion Unroe]

I noticed the same problem with my machine also! I just formatted and installed XP Pro. and have bearly anything but the OS on..... I did notice this and was wondering will this degrade performance on a gaming machine?! or does it only do this during idle times. Is there a way to prevent this?! Dion Unroe

 

[chaswood]

Does Filemon show any activity to the file trace.log in the WMI directory?

After running BootVis I had a problem with the system logging to this file until it filled up my drive. It was so bad that it degraded my system performance.

MS Tech Support helped me find the registry entry to turn it off. If you have this problem I'll post the fix.

 

[Bucksnort]

What you speak about is the indexing service running in xp to catalogue the files for faster searching and access. You can turn off the indexing service if you wish in administrative tools under services and applications and the mysterious har drive activity will cease but so will the indexing component.

 

[Nate420]

The files being accessed that account for most of the Unusuall disk access are these:

Windows\system32\wbem\repository\fs\objects.data (used by svchost:740)
objects.map (used by svchost:740)
Index.btr (used by svchost:740)
roll_forward (used by svchost:740)
Windows\system32\rpcss.dll (used by explorer.exe)
Documents and settings\all users\application data\microsoft\network connections\pbk\rasphone.pbk(used by MS Messenger alot)

Do these files look familiar to any of your XP savy people? Anything I can do about it?

Should I just not worry about it? Just seems like it shouldn't be necessary to access the disk once every second(no exageration, every second)