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Hard drive light/activity..... when nothing is running.
Hello,
I've recently bought the XPS-410, E6600 and thus far it has been flawless,
or else I just have begun to notice this "issue". I will reboot the machine at night,
and leave it at the login screen and go to bed. When I get up, or look at the HD light,
it will be blinking about once per second. It does not look like it is writing anything
(or even reading anything), just a constant blink... blink... blink.... blink.
I do not have the machine setup to hibernate, sleep or anything of that nature.
Task manager tells me that the system is 99% idle, so I have no idea what is causing
this HD activity.
The only addition I have made to the original configuration is adding a second 300Gig hard drive.
I am not using and RAID at all.
I have spoken with Dell and they blame it on several things like HD indexing, or
some setting in the BIOS, etc. Personally I do noy buy any of that. I have had this machine
for 3 weeks, and it does not index the HD for that long.
Has anyone else seen this?
Is there some explanation for this that is not occuring to me?
Again, I do not think this has been happening since the first day I got the PC.
-
Event log does not seem to offer any information on this either.
-
As an aside, on three different occasions, I have run the full blown CHKDSK which
I set to manually run when I reboot my PC. I have noticed that as it begins it's checking,
it mentions that "This volume is dirty".
I have never seen that before either. I keep my drives clean/defragged with
Diskeeper v.9.0, and run that fairly often so there should be no fragmentation problems.
Please advise any thoughts if you have seen this before, or what you MIGHT think
is happening.
Thank You.
- Will do.The Dell tech people I have talked to all said it was nothing to be worried about.I disagree..... if my HD light is flashing at all, at any time, then SOMETHING ishitting that drive for SOME reason.-I want to know what it is.-I will continue my research. If I find anything, I'll let you know.Trey
- MrTrey, I hope this reply isn't redundant. I'm not familiar with the mechanics of this forum - and either my first reply is on a stage coach - or, it never got off the launching pad. So, I'll do a repeat. After my initial reply, I contacted 'XPS Chat' and spent considerable time with the technician. After giving me her 'answer' - she took more time to consult with her supervisor. Conclusions: "The one blink per second of the hard-drive activity light is normal for these machines - under minimal activity." I ended up believing there is really no problem. Still, please keep me informed, should you learn otherwise. James
- Its good to find someone who shares my problem. I have this issue with
light ever since I installed vista on my 410. However I think my
problem is worse. I hear the HD working all the time nonstop Its so annoying
like a mother. I never had this issue with XP. I contacted microsoft
and they gave me this nonsense about defrag, clean, reboot,bla bla bla.
but no straight answer. Like one of the guys said above something is
causing the HD to work al the time. By the way all scheduled tasks are
turned off.
Please help. - Especially with Vista you're always going to have some type of drive activity. Windows is constantly updating the search index so you can quickly find programs, files and with Vista, emails. With Vista it automatically defrags your HD on the fly in the background. All this is done in the background when the system is idle. Over time the disk access will decrease but never cease completely.You could always switch to Windows 98 or Linux if you want zero disk access.Dave
- Why then, do my other XP machines not do this? I have a Dimension 5100, and old Compaq EN,and an NT40 server. NONE of them have this issue.-I maintain that indexing a hard drive does not take three weeks. Something is runningthat is NOT listed under "applications" in the task manager, and it is hitting my HD every second or so.-Again, task manager shows my system to be 99% idle, yet the HD blinks.-No one mentioned anythig about the other issue I have/had.... why does the full-blownchkdsk or scandisk done by Diskeeper v.9.0 indicate that my "volume is dirty"?-I have never seen that one either. Fragmentation is at an almost non-existant level, yetmy volume is dirty. Most of the research I have done says that that error message isan early warning of HD failure.-Add up the two problems, and I am dis-satisfied with this machine until someone atDell/Microsoft gives me a REAL answer.-They don't know either. Their tech support is miserable, and they just throw out "obvious" conditions that "could" cause this. None of their suggestions have held water.As for the defrag running all the time, I ran MSCONFIG and turned off EVERTHING that loads at boot-time, and still blink.... blink... blink.... blink.....Same pace, same rythym... SOS!As for switching back to win98, that comment put you in the category of those witha warped sense of humor, or just ignorance.T
- Found this:from a command prompt run:c:> fsutil dirty query C:This will tell you if the "dirty" bit is set for the drive.How/why it gets set remains a mystery.Trey
- I have dell xps 600 and recently installed vista. Right after the install I noticed the hard drive running like crazy for what seemed like forever. I hit cnrt+alt+del and open the task manager, and clicked on processes , and hit that button to show all processes for all users. I notcied the computer was doing a hard disk defrag ( even after I turned off automatic shecduling for background defraging). So I eneded this process and reboot. The hard drive activity went way down. But It still seems very active long after the boot up.. and also when I exit programs :(
- My XPS 410 does the same thing. It is not "dirty" when queried. There is no problem and many many others with XPS systems note the same blinking. Give it up. Nothing is wrong. Consider sending back your system since it appears you will never be happy.
jc55
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Posted February 15th, 2007 15:00