Please Help! Very Frustrated

[northernstar]

Hi, I just put together this new system.

AMD Athlon XP2100+
Asus A7N8X Motherboard
Corsair 256MB RAM
WD 40GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
MSI Geforce4 TI4200 64MB Video Card
SB Audigy Sound
Aopen 56K Modem
WinXP Home

My problem is that the stupid hard drive light is constintly blining. It does this every second, even when the computer is at idle. I tried formatting and reloading windows, shutting down stuff in the task manager, I tried everything and it keeps doing it. I am very frustrated because I just spent major cash on this system and all I can see is that stupid little hard drive light blinking in the corner of my eye. It's extremly annoying. It is also extremly embarassing, people think i bought a piece of junk. Please Help! Any suggestions would be a help.

Thanks!

 

[nja469]

Who cares? If it's that annoying unplug the hard drive LED!

 

[ciuly]

U r not very specific about what led is blinking, the harddisk led on it's electronic side or the hdd case led. If it's the hdd case led, just unplug the led from the MBO. If its the other one, better go with the hdd to warranty

 

[Rob423]

I always get MAXTOR drives.. never failed me yet

Is THG Slightly Slacking??

 

[dhlucke]

Try flipping the cable on the mobo so that the plus is where the minus was.

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[casiowatch]

If you flip the cable you might as well disconnect it. Led's don't work in opposite direction unless they are zener diodes.

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<b>All the world's problems can be solved through COMMON SENSE<b>

 

[jktzweiss]

try disabling System restore in xp, it is more than likely backing up your every move and causing this excess Hdd activity.

 

[dhlucke]

System restore is by far one of the most useful features of XP. I have it pinned to my start menu.

Speaking of which, I've noticed that my hard drive led blinks too. But I have a door on my case so I don't have to see it.

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[jktzweiss]

By no means am I saying that system restore isn't an important feature, but that's what is causing all this excess activity. Roxio's GoBack effectively does the same thing, I bought it for my father in law who's a little shakey on a computer and his hard drive light is constantly churning away with the hdd light blinking 98% of the time. If your system is running OK, it wouldn't hurt you to disable system restore to check this out( you'll only lose your restore points), and also if you've noticed in win me or xp with system restore enabled, your defragging alot because it's constantly writing to your hdd,next time you defrag, do an anaylsis and see what the most defragged files are, most of them will have to do with system restore. If you check this out and it proves to be true, I'd suggest doing what I did and disable system restore and purchase PowerQuest DriveImage 5.0 or DriveImage2002 and Image your Harddrive. Something goes wrong, restore your last image and your right back to where you were at. The software works GREAT, it's easy to use with a dos or windows interface & without all the hdd activity. I kinda looked at it this way, with all the things I do on my computer, data is written to my hdd many times in a day and then re-written again by system restore so i just figured it was extra wear and tear on the drive, so now I just image my system 2 times a week and that can be done automatically while I get my beauty sleep! Yea Right.... Hope you don't mind my lenghty input...

 

[dhlucke]

There's the indexing feature for faster searches that one could check out too though. It might be working on that.

Under search, change preferences, indexing service

I'll disable both the indexing service and the system restore and see what that does on my end. I personally don't care, but I'll see.

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[dhlucke]

Nope, wasn't either of those. Still blinking.

Yes that software is really good btw.

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[Lamoni]

I would have to repeat what has already been said, if you dislike the HD light so much, disconnect it. Everything will work the same without you ever seeing a light. Or if you are lazy and don't feel like opening up your case, a small piece of masking or electrical tape (depending on the color of your case) would also work, but not look as nice. I used a small piece of electrical tape for the light on my TV which was almost like a laser beam pointing at you if you sat in the wrong place.

If there is no problem with performance, crashes, or anything but the tiny light, just fix the light and leave everything else alone.

 

[chastee]

There's good news tonight:

In power control, I set my hard drive to spin down after 3 minutes -- and, get this -- it did. That meant the flickering light did not indicate R/W activity!!

Diskmon indicates no R/W activity during idle (not spin down) time!

Further, the flicker continued during the spin down. Repeat: The flicker continued during the spin down.

No flicker with W98 or MS-DOS startup disks.

But -- the good news is that there is no R/W activity indicated by the light flicker and no excessive wear on the hard drive head assembly. Rest easy on that score.

Thought you'd like to know!

chastee

BTW: 3 different mobo, 3 different brands of HDD.

 

[mafadecay]

I don't think system restore should cause HD LED to be on. Drive indexing would. Most likely culprit is the lack of your physical memory. Although you have enough XP thrives on more than 256MB otherwise it is constantly updating your swap file to create virtual memory. Run MSconfig startupo options and close down all those icons on the task bar (By the clock) that you really do not need. These are eating away at your 256MB. Try a constant page file size in virtual memory settings rather than letting XP manage it. You can always change it back. Check what XP is using and what it recommends and go with that figure for Min and Max. Atleast for now.

 

[kreatorone]

you need more memory and bigger hd

 

[Zoron]

Someone simply isn't experienced with NT-based operating systems...

Yes, the hard drive light will blink often... even when you're not using the computer. Yes, everything is operating correctly; there is NOTHING wrong. I don't know why some people get so uptight when they see that light blinking.

If you're replacing hardware because the hard drive light is blinking too much for your taste, you're completely wasting your time. Everything is operating as it should.