hdd light

[fatlad]

Hi Everyone

Have a problem with my computor, every minute or so my hdd light comes on solid for about 8 seconds and while its on cannot do nothing on my computor, the system i'm running is xp.

I am wondering if anybody have had the same problem is and how do i fix it.

Many thanks

[demos70]

I've seen this problem on Dell Vostro laptops. Disabling Intel Stepping in Bios helped a little bit. So worst case scenario it being a hardware problem, in that case Google for your hardware and similar problems, try to download your hdd's software to test hard disk drive functionality/sanity tests...etc.

If it's a software problem you can easily find out:
Launch task manager, click on Processes, click twice on 'Mem Usage tab' to sort processes by memory usage so that you have the highest memory consuming process on top of the list.
That process would be the one causing your hard drive to spin because it'll be busy accessing reading/writing to your pagefile.sys.
If you kill that process, or increase your RAM, you should be fine.

Something like a browser that has many tabs opened running heavy webpages utilizing Adobe Flash.

Good Luck.

[fatlad]

Cheers demos

Will have a look and give it a go will let you know tomorrow.

Thanks

[demos70]

Great, while you're at it, you can download any small Linux live distro, burn it on CD and use it to boot your computer. Run some apps, if you still have the hard disk spinning and slow response then most probably it is a hardware issue.

On the Dell Vostro I'm talking about, the hard drive and slow response appeared even when just entering the Bios and browsing the Bios menus...so it was clearly an issue irrelevant to OS/software.

[fatlad]

Hi demos

Hopefully all sorted ran the chkdsk it took bloody hours to run, and the pc seems fine now so a big thanks.

Cheers