What is happening to my hard drive??

[Cheex]

My HDD LED is constantly on....even when my comp is idle.

Why is this happening? It won't go off.

I tried rebooting and it still does it.

Is my HDD dying?

 

[RyanM]

Constant disk access, often called "disk thrashing," is usually a symptom of insufficient RAM, heavy disk fragmentation, disk failure, or a virus/spyware infection.

The first thing I'd do is a simple SMART diagnostic on the drive to determine it's health. You can perform this with software such as Speedfan or HD Tune.

If the hard drive SMART status is good, then it's more likely to be one of the other problems. How much RAM does the system have? What does Task Manager tell you about the software running on your system? When's the last time you ran a full system scan for viruses and spyware?

 

[Cheex]

I have 2GB of RAM.

SpeedFan shows that my HDD is in great health.

Last full scan: right now actually.

 

[RyanM]

So at idle, is there anything consuming your CPU cycles in the Task Manager?

Are you on Vista or XP?

 

[Cheex]

XP right now and there is nothing going on.

98% idle
1% Task Manager

Maybe I should boot into Vista and see if that happens also.

 

[0roo0roo]

disc indexing, other windows house keeping.

 

[RebateMonger]

By "constantly on", do you mean that it doesn't flicker on/off at all? Or do you see it flicker as the hard drive is accessed?

 

[Cheex]

Yes it is "constantly on". No flickering or anything.

 

[Cheex]

I just did the in-depth online analysis in SpeedFan.

The overall fitness for this drive is 89%.
The overall performance for this drive is 100%.

What shape am I in here?

 

[thorin]

How old is the system? Are you sure the drive access light is connected properly? Do you actually constantly hear drive access?

 

[Ausm]

I seen HD lights stay on constantly if hooked up incorrectly and also I have seen HD lights stay on constantly due to a virus.


Risin

 

[Scarpozzi]

There's always a chance that you have some program (not necessarily a virus) that's trying to access it. Go through your programs in task manager and shut them down one at a time to see if you can isolate it.

If it's happening in both Vista and XP, it's hard to say what's causing it... It may be 2 separate issues.

 

[Cheex]

This is wierd. I think it was being caused by the Vista Inspirat 2 Theme Pack.
I uninstalled that first and maybe it was still doing it, not too sure, but today now it just stopped doing it.

Good thing I was planning on formatting anyway. Want to be FRESH for the Crysis demo, just to see what my rig is made of.
I'm cleaning up right now to do my formatting (I'm on my laptop).