lastalive0.dat lastalive1.dat

[JareD]

I am using Windows Vista on HP laptop. As per my work I need to keep writing something on my hard drive continuously or once every minute. I guess due to this my HDD is just unable to sleep while powering off. I have also noticed that the harddrive writes to 2 files, flipping between them: lastalive0.dat lastalive1.dat and these files are at c:\windows\serviceprofiles\localservice\appdata\local\lastaliveX.dat.

When I checked the sysinternals process monitor, here is what I got:

0 fltmgr.sys FltRequestOperationStatusCallback +
0xd25 0x8073f843 C:\Windows\system32\drivers\fltmgr.sys
1 fltmgr.sys FltGetIrpName +
0x774 0x80741f10 C:\Windows\system32\drivers\fltmgr.sys
2 fltmgr.sys FltGetIrpName +
0x104f 0x807427eb C:\Windows\system32\drivers\fltmgr.sys
3 fltmgr.sys FltGetIrpName +
0x146b 0x80742c07 C:\Windows\system32\drivers\fltmgr.sys
4 ntkrnlpa.exe IofCallDriver +
0x64 0x81c27ecf C:\Windows\system32\ntkrnlpa.exe
5 ntkrnlpa.exe IoIsFileObjectIgnoringSharing +
0x344d 0x81d88f65 C:\Windows\system32\ntkrnlpa.exe
6 ntkrnlpa.exe NtWriteFile + 0x725 0x81d94358 C:\Windows\system32\ntkrnlpa.exe
7 ntkrnlpa.exe KeReleaseInStackQueuedSpinLockFromDpcLevel +
0xba2 0x81c8c96a C:\Windows\system32\ntkrnlpa.exe
8 ntdll.dll ZwWriteFile + 0xc 0x77dd06d0 C:\Windows\System32\ntdll.dll
9 wevtsvc.dll ServiceMain + 0xce12 0x74b4809d c:\windows\system32\wevtsvc.dll
10 wevtsvc.dll ServiceMain + 0xcbf9 0x74b47e84 c:\windows\system32\wevtsvc.dll
11 kernel32.dll BaseThreadInitThunk +
0x12 0x77913833 C:\Windows\system32\kernel32.dll
12 ntdll.dll LdrInitializeThunk +
0x4d 0x77daa9bd C:\Windows\System32\ntdll.dll

Is anyone having any info on this problem ?

[Andrus K]

Same thing happening with my laptop as well. It just wont get into sleep mode because hard drive keeps spinning continuously. After suggested by few people I changed the settings to shut off the hard drive sleep.Well that helped me bit not completely. I think due to the same now when my system remains idle I can notice the IDE light flickers exactly every second. I tried disabling startup programs, various service but nothing helped so far. Hope I get something useful here.

[voitek]

As far as I know Xp or Vista write a time stamp every five minutes to the registry and this is what that wont allow the HDD to go to sleep. After doing some research I came to know that it is just useless on PCs and laptops that we use. Those feature is only required on the servers. So, we should shut it down. Here is how you can do that:

Open registry editor by typing regedit in the start menu and navigate to the following location:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Reliability

Here set the value to zero. This will disable the timestamp logging. Don’t worry just bootup and shutdown timestamps will be logged.