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Blinking HDD light eveery 2 -3 seconds

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rirusstek2

Technical User
Dec 10, 2003
236
US
Have installed a DP55WG with a I7 860 and a Radeon 4850 with a 640 HDD. Windows 7 Ultimate. 8GB memory

Everything running real good after built.

the only concern I have is the Activity (red) light that briefly blinks every 2 - 3 seconds and so does the SATA drive activity LED (blue).

After installing Win7 and noticing this I ran ProcMon and got these results


but after running it several times the results varied too much for me to be able to pinpoint some issue that could be causing this activity of the HDD.

I clean reinstalled W7, the brief blinks continued, this without installing anything else, not even internet, I got this:


I then got another HDD and clean installed (single HDD by itself) Windows XP pro and the blinking was the same, again without installing any additional programs or Internet I got this:


Any ideas or suggestions?

Thank you.


note: There is no blinking when Using the setup menus (F2)

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I partially placed this question in another post for Windows XP, but after considering I believe it is a hardware/ issue.
 
For that matter, does the light flicker when you're, say, in the BIOS setup? That would tell you if it's a hardware "feature" or a windows "feature".

Well, when in BIOS Setup the light is completely OFF, and stays off, so, as you mentioned, it has to be something with Windows and these new Mobos and all that memory.

I connected just one drive at a time, and just one makes it flicker, either one. I even plugged in an IDE Optical drive, and does the same every few seconds.

But definetely something is making Windows check those drives every so often.
 
Just for the heck of it, go into BIOS and disable the optical drives and try that.

Regards,
David.
 
Yeah, it's sounding like just the way it works with the combination of your motherboard and Windows. I bet you'd even get the same results if you loaded about any modern version of Linux - IF it has any feature like auto-play. Like gbaugma mentioned, the system has to check to see if there is a disk in the drives in order to be ready as soon as one is inserted. It should be a resource-lite operation to do so, which would explain the frequency. Personally, based on your testing so far, I'd just not worry about it, and go about my business... unless you want to try swapping the whole motherboard. [wink]

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me
 
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