After installing XP, my hard drive LED is on constantly.

After installing XP, my hard drive LED is on constantly.
I installed Windows 98 on the drive and the LED is not on constantly.
I have even tried a different make of drive
and the LED is also on constantly when XP is installed.
I have tried disabling Indexing and that did not resolve it.
Any suggestions?

 

Two suggestions:

- do a full virus scan from an online scanner like Housecall.

- after that, Ctrl-Alt-Del, Task Manager and go to the processes tab. Sort by CUP use and see if any process other than System Idle is routinely taking up a bunch of CPU time. That may point to the problem.

- then check your event logs for errors & warnings that look like they might be related.

 

If your hard drive is spinning, you should see an hourglass. If no hourglass, I'd just ignore the red led, particularly if it is brighter when the hour-glass is showing.

Thus, hourglass + bright led = h/d activity.
No hourglass + dull led = inexplicable harmless anomaly.

 

Thanks for your assistance. I routinely do a virus scan. Task Manager does not show any significant CPU time other than System Idle. Event logs do not show anything that might be related to drive problems. I installed a new WD drive and loaded XP on it and the LED was on constantly without anything else being done to the drive. I am thinking that there must be some sort of compatibility problem between Western Digital drives, XP and my BIOS, or something like that. I do not have a constant hourglass on. The reason I want to resolve this problem is because I can't use my FAX modem program - I get a message about to much drive activity.

Jeff

 

I found this on my Daughter's machine too!

I believe it's to do with the paging file. In her case she had minimum RAM (256MB) and hard drive was running low. She also had Yahoo Messenger as a start up tray icon. Bigger HDD and removal of Messenger from the start-up, Bingo! No more LED.

Just a though, worth a try?

Oh yeah - and Scandisk and defrag!!

 

Other stuff to try:

Is your disk formatted to NTFS? It should be!

Is Microsoft's Office indexing program running?

What services do you have on startup? ...And do you need them?

Does it do this in Safe Mode too?

Have you allocated a large read-ahead cache to your HDDs?

Try enabling P10 rather toan DMA to your Primary IDE driver in Control Panel...Device Manager...Hardware settings