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Strange HDD behavior.

Moab

Member
I am not sure how to explain this so I am going to do the best that I can given the circumstances, the sound that I am hearing is not something I can really recognize or say I have heard before.

My motherboard: Gigabyte DS3
CPU: E6600
Ram: 2GB DDR2
OS: XP SP2

This is what is going on: my hard drive randomly spins, it's not reading anything, I don't hear the arms moving around, I don't hear anything writing either. It just spins, I can hear it doing stuff. The HDD light does not turn on and no processes are listed as doing crazy stuff. It goes on for a while then just goes back to being quiet. The only thing so far that I can maybe guess is causing it is when Firefox is open, but that might be because Firefox is always open when I am on the PC and I am not around sitting with out it open so I wouldn't hear it when I am away. It's not a very loud noise, its kind of a constant hum or spin or whir, its not the normal hard drive on noise, its something else but it's not real activity. I even went into the BIOS and waited around to see if it would do anything, the IDE one did the same noise that it did in Windows, just did a strange spin thing, the SATA one does as well but I would have to confirm that.

This is the third drive that has done this. The first one was hooked up via IDE and every hour or so it would decide to turn on and make noise and then go dormant again. Then I put in an SATA drive and that one did the same thing. Then that SATA drive got the click of death and I had to get it replaced. Now the new SATA hard drive is doing the same noise thing. What is strange is that it is only the primary hdd that makes the noise. I have a second one in there hooked up to another SATA port and it does none of this stuff.

I have also run some SMART utilities and the one that spins is listed as being ok, it has a 98 on the spin up retry count instead of a 100, that is the only thing that it seems wrong.

Any ideas? I am going to try switching the primary SATA to a different SATA port to see what will happen, but since the IDE one did it as well I wonder what the heck is going on that is triggering this stuff.

This is also a fresh install of XP. It happened before the format and now again on the new drive with a clean install. System fully checked for viri, spyware, etc.
 
You said that this is the third drive that's done this. That seems unusual.

I see you have a fresh XP install, but I'd still be suspicious that your system is infected - used as someone's server.

You don't list your security apps, but there are very good free firewall apps that will allow you to closely monitor outbound internet traffic. Online Armor is a good one, and features HIPS protection as well to detect program start-up activity.

Hope this helps!
 
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