About 1 week ago I started hearing my HDD constantly spinning I have 512k memory on a windows XP pro AMD 1.2 Athlon system. I have run scandisk, defrag, and disk cleanup with no results. If I completely shut down my computer it doesn't start to do the constant spin till about 5 minutes after boot up. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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HDD constantly working I have plenty of memory
- Thread starter somi
- Start date
See what services you have running in the background. A good one to check on is the Indexing Service which causes a lot of Disk activity. If you go to this site you can see what Services are safe to turn off.
A virus can cause this also, or if you have a corrupted swap file.
Something else to look into, if you have a folder with over 2GB of files in it. Not including in subfolders.
Don't ask me why but something that I have noticed with WinME as well as xp. If a folder has close to or more than 2GB of files or programs in it, not includding subfolders, it will cause a lot of hdd activety as well as the system will start moving slowly.
![[lightsaber]](/data/assets/smilies/lightsaber.gif "[lightsaber] [lightsaber]")
Something else to look into, if you have a folder with over 2GB of files in it. Not including in subfolders.
Don't ask me why but something that I have noticed with WinME as well as xp. If a folder has close to or more than 2GB of files or programs in it, not includding subfolders, it will cause a lot of hdd activety as well as the system will start moving slowly.
Just try and hit Ctrl-Shift-Escape (get the taskmanager running) and see which processes are using CPU cycles.. It could be the prefetching process, although that isn't scheduled to run before 30 mins of idle time. (Ofcourse to rule that out, you could force it to run
run:
so that it won't start for another 30 boots or so, or just disable the prefetcher
registry:
Other things to try: did you bluescreen, and is the system still generating the memory dump (process savedump should be active)?
Are there any scheduled tasks active?
run:
Ofcourse, the indexing service has already been mentioned
run:
Also, a virusscanner could be running a background scan..
And: when looking at the taskmgr, just try and see how much virtual memory is used wrt. the physical memory.. If you're using a *lot* of memory, that could also explain the thrashing you're seeing...
Good luck, and keep us informed...
run:
Code:
rundll32 advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasksso that it won't start for another 30 boots or so, or just disable the prefetcher
registry:
Code:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters -> EnablePrefetcher:REG_DWORD=0Other things to try: did you bluescreen, and is the system still generating the memory dump (process savedump should be active)?
Code:
tasklist /fi "imagename eq savedump.exe"Are there any scheduled tasks active?
run:
Code:
%SystemRoot%\TasksOfcourse, the indexing service has already been mentioned
run:
Code:
net stop cisvcAlso, a virusscanner could be running a background scan..
And: when looking at the taskmgr, just try and see how much virtual memory is used wrt. the physical memory.. If you're using a *lot* of memory, that could also explain the thrashing you're seeing...
Good luck, and keep us informed...
- Thread starter
- #6
Thanks for all the help everyone, unfortunately I think I got a virus my system started crashing component by component so I wiped out my drive and reloaded win xp. But I can still hear the HD spinning. I'm going to swap it with another one to see if somethings wrong with the HD itself.
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