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| Tags: dual boot, flash, gigabyte, hard drive, sata, windows 95, windows vista, windows xp |
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#1
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| Hard drive light constantly flashing ,reading hard drive during id dual boot machine XP/Vista Home Prem. , This is a pretty fast machine with plenty of horsepower to run Vista. Gigabyte Mobo, Athlon 64 X2 4400+ chip, 4gb OCZ 800mhz. RAM, plenty of cooling and I'm not overclocking the processor or anything like that. During system IDLE the HD light is constantly flashing and I can hear it reading the HD. I have a IDE 160GB primary HD cut in half and each partition has plenty of extra space after all software was installed. A secondary SATA 300mbs 320 GB drive for DATA. It did not do this after I initially installed both systems and got them up and running using Vistas boot manager with Vista as the default. I just need to know where to start looking. I have had this problem before but only when I did not have enough system resources on the HD or RAM when I had a dual boot OS/2 / Windows 95 machine long ago. OS/2 was just too much for it and it constantly read the HD, I assume reading and writing to the sys.pagefile due to lack of enough memory. Anyone know where to start looking with this much information? If you need to know all of the software installed I can get that together with no problem. Thanks In Advance for the help, |
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#2
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The hard drive is working constantly because Vista is indexing the drive. It should stop after a few days, depending on how many files you have. It makes searches a lot faster. But, initially, you will notice a lot of hard drive activity. I am having the same issue with Vista 64-bit but I've turned off indexing and superfetch and the hard drive is still running all the time when I'm not doing anything on the computer. What is there to disable to get it to stop doing this? On another point, you generally run a 64 bit version for improved performance. Turning off prefetch is a sure way to slow down the system. If you are performance oriented, enable it. Have fun. |
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#3
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3gb. it usually starts when the computer is just sitting idle. Internet Explorer doesnt' seem to interrupt it but If I start a game it usually stops. If I go into sleep mode, the hard drive will continue to run almost immediately after waking it up. i also have turned off powerboost. |
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#4
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| Re: Hard drive light constantly flashing ,reading hard drive during id
Use the Performance and Reliability Monitor in Adminstrative Tools to get an idea of what is going on with the drive activity. This gave me useful info and a suggested course to take in a similar situation. I found out that the system was spending excessive time writing to the page file and followed the suggestion in the report. |
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#5
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| Re: Hard drive light constantly flashing ,reading hard drive during id
I upgraded my Acer Aspire from 1Gig to 2 Gig when I purchased it and have not had any low memory issues that I can detect. I guess it depends what software you run and how memory intensive the software is. But it is amazing how much memory you need considering my first 386 computer only had 1MB and I thought upgrading to 2MB was cutting edge! |
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#6
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| Re: Hard drive light constantly flashing ,reading hard drive duringid
Close all applications. Run Perfmon. Click on Disk. Click on disk Write. If your system sits "idle" long enough you should eventually see disk write drop off to nothing. If not, look to see what is causing disk IO. Turning off Superfetch and indexing on your fixed disk drive(s) kills lots of disk IO without effecting system performance. The "hard drive light" can indicate more than just fixed disk activity. If your case IO light keeps blinking about once a second after disk write activity stops then there is no disk activity - the problem may be the SATA/IDE chipset IO polling related to your CD/DVD drive. If this is the case disconnect the SATA or IDE connection to your CD/DVD drive. Does this reduce of eliminate "apparent" IO activity? What is your motherboard brand/model and the SATA/IDE chipset(s) on the motherboard? |
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#7
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RB, you seem to have given the best advice here, sir. I am having the same issue as described above--the drive light blinks about every second when nothing is apparently going on and no apps are visibly running (other than whatever background apps are running). This is occurring on a brand-new, virus-free Toshiba laptop with a P7350 Duo 2 processor with 4 GB of DDR3 RAM and Vista 64. Perfmon shows the activity and also shows a constant processor util of about 4%-7%. The used resources (memory) stat is about 30% (so, apparently, Vista is a major resource hog, I guess). The only thing that appears to be accessing the drive is the operating system, but I may be missing something because it's hard to look at all that in a glance and I haven't searched out every line to see exactly what it is. What say you for my situation? P.S. I have also noticed that the mouse (touchpad) pointer appears to skip a beat every now and then and/or appear to freeze momentarily. I just plugged in an external mouse to see if it does the same with the mouse (to determine if the problem is with the touchpad or my comfortability with it rather than a system performance problem). Thanks in advance, Logos Child |
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#8
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| Re: Hard drive light constantly flashing ,reading hard drive during id
Lots of stuff run in the background with Vista. It is not likely you will ever get to a point that the disk light does not flash occasionally. It indexes the drives, defrags the drives, relocates most used stuff to the fastest part of the drive, it builds lists of most used apps, it checks for updates, it phones home for validation, ..... The list is much longer. The point is that it is NOT XP, and don't expect to make it act like XP. Flashing drive lights are what Vista does. |
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#9
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| Re: Hard drive light constantly flashing ,reading hard drive during id
It is the CD or DVD ROM. Try going to the Safely Remove hardware (even though it may not be a usb) and do Stop on the CD or DVD listed. If you don't see it there and want to verify that this is indeed it, just disconnect the ribbon cable, reboot. You'll notice the blinking is gone. I don't know exactly why--I think on some OS's and some DVD/CD units, the os constantly checks it--it might be as the DVD unit gets older--i've had this happen twice--always after about a year from when I got the dvd unit. --Jim |
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