My HD keeps reading and wont stop

[badkitty]

My system is :

P4 C2D 2.4ghz
gigabyte p965-ds3
4gb DDR800
ATI 1900xtx
WD 74gb Raptor

my problem is this , no matter if im in a game , surfing internet of completely idle. My HD keeps reading for half sec then stop for half second. I turned off file indexing on boths drives. I've run spybot S&D , bitdefender all found a few things but fixed. I have unselected programs from MSCONFIG/startup. I have run a full defrag on both my drives. WIndows update is OFF. there nothing i can see that would be doing this.

Is there a program that can monitor what process acccess the HD at any given time? i've gone thru a bunch of forums on subject , the things i've tried have worked for others , but not me yet.

 

[Baez]

There isn't a program for that no. There are process monitors but they measure CPU and RAM usage.

Are you running Vista?

 

[badkitty]

win xp pro

my system idle process is jumping from 50-70% but only 20K memory , if that helps

 

[Baez]

Please don't double post.

Is BitDefender the only antivirus you have running?

 

[badkitty]

Only bit defender.

 

[eyeCpc]

MS has a utility for montioring all processes called Autoruns. Autoruns for Windows

For hard drives the utilities seen there are diagnostic and benchmark types like HDTune. HD Tune That will also run a scan looking for any bad sectors.

 

[Baez]

That isn't a very efficient antivirus. I would suggest scanning again with at least the free version of AVG.

 

[eyeCpc]

Are you simply going by the steady blink every few seconds of the hard drive led there? If that's what you are concerned about it's normal activity and nothing to worry about. With 3 HDs in the case here that's always blinking every few seconds.

I have to agree with Baez about giving AVG a good run saying good bye to BitDefender. SpyBot S&D was good in it's day but passed by a few others like Spyware Terminator at this time. But a blinking HLed is a normal activity not any specific process to point at or infection.

 

[badkitty]

no i can actually hear the drive and its annoying. if i download a large file..or copy a file from drive to drive..the HD light doesnt STAY ON , like a normal write , but it too goes off and on during the write, but is just louder since its probably doing some actual WRITING.

i hope thta makes sense.the only way i've been able to fix this when it happened in the past was reinstall windows. So that tells me at the least its not my HD.

 

[eyeCpc]

When you can hear the drive that usually means the drive itself is seeing a problem and simply allowed you to reinstall Windows. Every single hard drive I've run never made any sounds.

The one other thing before pointing at the drive being simply noisey would be some bug like a trojan downloader or you have a program on that is still to unpack or update itself. If you runnig Vista the Super Fetch that preloads items even the disk defragmenting tool into memory would be the thought there.

XP does have a limited PreFetch there however while most things like the disk defrag were either scheduled or manually started. Speaking of schedules? Have anything set on a schedule?