For some reason my hard drive is accessing a lot when I'm not using it. It isn't defragmenting or playing any music from the drive, yet the drive sits there blinking away. Why is this?

Ninjabear

Download and run manufacturers diagnostic!

Mike

back round windows stuff?

What are you using for AV and spyware/adware/malware removal?

I had a similar problem a few years ago, except it was my CPU and DSL were both going like crazy when the computer should have been idle. Turned out to be a worm. I put AV on that computer after that, amazing how much crap is on the children's sites my neice and nephew go to.

I use Ad-aware and PCcillin internet Security 2007 on both of my computers now. Pccillin has a built in adware removal tool so I use Ad-aware to back that up.

Are you using any antivirus or antispyware. Try doing a full scan with both. Might be a hidden/unwanted background program.

HTH

I use Outpost (a very highly recommended firewall) and AVG free antivirus (which is essentially the same as their pro version). I'm also using Spybot which I swear by for spyware.

Recently I did have some virus troubles but I did an AVG scan and it should have removed them. I'm reluctant to format my hdd to get rid of the problem without doubt because I've only just done that to fix other problems and I was beginning to get back to rights again.

I've done a full AVG scan as mentioned, also did a Spybot scan but all it found was Firefox tracking cookies (which it always does).

Use FileMon from SYSINTERNALS. (Actually owned by MS now.)

It will show each disk access and by what process.

Are you running Windows Vista? If so, the indexing service really makes the HDD's grind constantly. After it has indexed all watched folders, it shouldn't be a constant thing however.

If your having this trouble in XP, try running housecall:


http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/ [...] _housecall

Its free and can be a good way to verify that your AV is doing a good job. Usually takes about 30 to 45 minutes for a full scan. I have had friends and customers that had various AV's (they don't always take my advise in this regard) and when they run this it usually finds something the other missed. IME Norton is the worst offender, seems to miss alot.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the idea Zenmaster, I was wondering how to do that.

I'm on XP actually, so will give Housecall a go for certain.

Thanks for all comments, very helpful.

XP has an indexing service also. Make sure it is disabled. A lot of software likes to "report back," checking for updates, although I wouldn't expect it to cause constant activity. If the Windows auto-update is on, it will do this too. I recommend turning this off, or setting it to alert only. Otherwise, Microsquishy may try to pull a fast one, like it did when it released IE7 as a "critical" update. This auto-hosed a lot of machines. Many companies are still testing IE7 and fixing their web apps to work with it.

Thanks for the help. The other thing that's happening at the moment is I'm getting Dr Watson Postmortem debugger error every time I load folders. Explorer (I think) then crashes and all my folder windows dissappear. Is there any way to fix this?

AVG hasn't detected any new viruses, neither did Trendsecure, which took an hr to complete. I'm now running Panda online scanner to be sure there are no residual viruses, like I said I did have one but AVG AV suposedly got rid of it.

Filemon was very useful in sorting this out, I think that I've now fixed the problem. I was looking through the entries and I kept seeing this c:\windows\system32\shell32.dll. There were a lot of shell32 files, although I suspect that these are simply to do with the windows kernel or something like that. Anyway, continuing down the fltered list I came across Diskeeper, ahhhhhh! how embarrasing. I hadn't set up Automatic degragmentation on my f: drive but as it turns out, Diskeeper has an option (enabled by default) which auto scans for new volumes and adds automatic degragmentation to them. So when I added my hard drive it must have gone, oooh there's a nice drive to defrag and then tried to degrag it in the background. It'd be nice if it could have told me about this.

Anyway, problem fixed, thanks for the help, I just need to fix that Dr Watson thing. I know there is a Dr Watson virus, but I think this is just the real one crashing for some reason.