Why does my Hard Drive Activity Light Constantly Blink

computersplus said:

well I gotta tell you that doing an upgrade is the worst thing to do you would be better served to just wipe the disk clean and start over and I mean delete the partition create a new one format it and install 7 not upgrade to it these forums are littered with problems stemming from upgrades I've said a thousand times that Microsoft needs to stop offering upgrades it does nothing but cause trouble and gives them more of a bum rap because people do it and when it doesn't work properly they bash the OS itself you have to remember if you have any existing problem with the operating system that you are upgrading the upgrade will only magnify the issue.

I hear ya. I did a clean install so I basically did wipe the drive and installed Windows 7 as if it were new media. I didn't have this issue with XP....had others but not this one. I would buy an Mac before a reinstall Windows 7 again.

just remember that you are running 7 on a computer designed for XP so it's not really a fair trial of 7 we can only expect so much of our old hardware as operating systems improve they utilize the hardware and drivers in different ways so as to improve speed and stability we always seem to go through this with new OS I remember when XP came people were screaming wanting to lynch MS but now look same thing is happening with 7 and XP it's really actually comical when you stand back and look at it.

I tried diagnostic start up and it made no difference--it still blinks. This is on a MSI G41 mobo with AMI BIOS (which I earlier mistakenly referred to as Award) and new WD 500GB Black HD. (Windows 7)

I did notice that it is a S.M.A.R.T. drive and tried to find how to turn it off but I found nothing in the BIOS where I could turn it off. So this is another possibility to check.

i have a laptop in the shop right now doing the same thing only it's running XP the cause of the problem is a bad block on the hard drive so i would run check disk or western digital lifeguard tools on that drive also check the event viewer in control panel admin tools the error about any issue with the drive will show up under system

I have the same problem on my brand new Dell Precision M4400 which came with Win 7 Pro x64 pre-installed. When I attach a USB thumb drive, after using it, closing any programs (inc Explorer) accessing it, the LED on the thumb drive blinks approx once per 10 seconds. And this goes on constantly while the drive is attached.

There seems to be no way to turn off indexing for this one, Properties have no option for that. The Resource Monitor show no activity on the USB drive, but I've noticed that the LED seems to blink at the same time as there is activity on the HD. Could it be that activity on any drive shows as activity on all drives?

// OppfinnarJocke

There is a service in both Vista and 7 that writes to two files lastalive0.dat and lastalive1.dat. This happens every second hence the flashing. It is like Window's heartbeat. What is it for? Perhaps it helps when things crash. Every time this is written, various logs are written to too. Years ago we said that Windows was the result of a programmer gone mad. Still true?

Chuckles said:

There is a service in both Vista and 7 that writes to two files lastalive0.dat and lastalive1.dat. This happens every second hence the flashing. It is like Window's heartbeat. What is it for? Perhaps it helps when things crash. Every time this is written, various logs are written to too. Years ago we said that Windows was the result of a programmer gone mad. Still true?

Yup I have the same problem with my hard drive light flashing with a low pulse every other second even will idling. I have also shut everything off I could think of and what I see left when using "Resource Monitor" is:

lastalive0.dat
lastalive1.dat

After searching across the web I have found some folks claiming that these little bad boys are somehow a part of the Task Scheduler, and that you can somehow turn something off there to get rid of these. Any thoughts?