My hard drive is spinning continuously

Yougottawanna

Hey, I hope you all can help me with a problem...it's what it says in the title: my hard drive is spinning continuously, I can hear, it spins all the time now, regardless of whether the computer is actually doing anything. (I use windows XP)

I looked around for answers on google, and found a bunch of suggestions, including: check for spyware etc.. (I did, with Avast), defrag your hard drive (I did), use add/remove programs to clear out unneeded stuff (I did), and adjust your computer's power settings (I did). None of that stuff worked.

I did find one suggestion that I wasn't able to do - someone suggested I change my preferences as to how often the computer writes to the hard drive. But the suggestion didn't say how, it only said that it was in my "user preferences page" and after googling several combinations of every related word I couldn't find how to do that.

Others posts I found brought up the possibility of windows using virtual memory, and that I need more RAM. But I have 2 gigs of RAM and my computer's never done this before, it only started a few days ago.

Overall system info is this:
Windows XP
AMD 3200+ with 2 gigs RAM
hard drive is 232 gigs with 30 gigs or so free

I hope someone here has an idea, because I'm out of ideas. I've tried everything I can think or find on the internet.

slash000

Do you have antivirus software that is running in the background, constantly scanning files?

Arivia

Alternatively, are you running a BitTorrent program or something similar that would absolutely love to write to the disk? A backup program?

Pheezer

Also are you sure you hear the hard drive and you don't just have a noisy fan (perhaps with a bad ball bearing in it making it louder than it used to be)

finalflight89

Your hard drive is always spinning! You should only hear it when the read head moves quickly from place to place, i.e. when the hard disk light is flashing.

TetraNitroCubane

Two programs you might want to look into are (1) Process Explorer, and (2) Process Monitor.

Process Explorer is the easier one to use. It's just a fancier Task Manager. If you run it, it'll let you see all the programs and their dependencies. From here, I'd check to see which program is eating up your CPU constantly (It'll be listed in one of the columns). Process Monitor is a program I don't have experience with, but it will let you see what programs are accessing files, and what the files are, in realtime.

Enig

Your hard drive should usually be spinning when the computer is on. If it is making noise other than the clicky noise it makes when it's actually reading/writing data, then it might be wearing down, in which case you should consider backing up your files very soon.

Recoil42

I'm going to throw my hat in as the third person to say: This made me laugh. Hard drives are supposed to spin continuously. That's how they work.

Disk access though (clicking) is a completely different thing.


Anyways, I'll second the suggestion of Process Explorer. An alternate course that might get you somewhere is to hit Ctrl-Alt-Esc, go to the Performance tab, and hit Resource Monitor. That should give you a list of all your processes doing disk access, and give you a better idea of what's going on.

edit: I actually just noticed you're on Windows XP, so that advice might actually not be so... possible -- afaik, XP doesn't have Resource Monitor in it. Good future advice though on Vista/W7, if you ever get into a similar situation.

Satsumomo

For XP you can use Process explorer, unfortunately I don't remember what exactly you have to do, but you have to make it show you I/O data or something along those lines, it will tell you what program is requesting so much disk access.

Yougottawanna

Hey, thanks for the replies everyone. Yeah, I should've said that my hard drive was always clicking, or whatever you'd call that noise. But it turns it wasn't, it was the power source making the noise. Weird because it sounded exactly the way the hard drive does when it's "thinking."

I was worried the drive was gonna crap out on me so I took it to a repair place to get looked at and it's now fixed. So, problem solved.....

Reboot

So what's the actual cause of the HDD clicking?

Pheezer

See? I totally called it. Bad fan.