Constant Hard Drive Activity Light Gateway DX4860

[Barndtron]

For as long as I've had this machine (a little over a year) the HDD light is constantly going wild. (Erratic blinking, but ALWAYS blinking)

After purchasing it, I had to send it in for a warranty claim on a bad mother board.

Got it back, works fine. Used it for a few months, light still blinking.

I've always viewed it as bothersome, but nothing serious.

But now I can HEAR the hard drive making little noises. And I'm worried it's going to fail.

Disk check shows everything is OK. Ran Malwarebytes, Spypot S&D, and Avast! Virus Scan, no issues. I've defragged, tried disabling indexing and the DVD drive. Still blinking.

I've looked at Resource Monitor to see what is using the hard drive, and the list updates so often I can't even see what's doing what. It appears to be mostly activity from Firefox and system processes.

I'm all out of ideas. I'm thinking of upgrading to an SSD with a fresh Windows 8 install, but I don't want to do that and have the light STILL blink.

Could it be a still faulty motherboard? Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[Sir George]

For as long as I've had this machine (a little over a year) the HDD light is constantly going wild. (Erratic blinking, but ALWAYS blinking)

After purchasing it, I had to send it in for a warranty claim on a bad mother board.

Got it back, works fine. Used it for a few months, light still blinking.

I've always viewed it as bothersome, but nothing serious.

But now I can HEAR the hard drive making little noises. And I'm worried it's going to fail.

Disk check shows everything is OK. Ran Malwarebytes, Spypot S&D, and Avast! Virus Scan, no issues. I've defragged, tried disabling indexing and the DVD drive. Still blinking.

I've looked at Resource Monitor to see what is using the hard drive, and the list updates so often I can't even see what's doing what. It appears to be mostly activity from Firefox and system processes.

I'm all out of ideas. I'm thinking of upgrading to an SSD with a fresh Windows 8 install, but I don't want to do that and have the light STILL blink.

Could it be a still faulty motherboard? Does anyone have any ideas?

I have four computers, none with an SSD, and everyone of them has almost constant HD activity; there are some pauses. I don't really know why the HD's are so busy, but I don't really care either.

HTH

 

[andrew129260]

Are you hearing a clicking noise? Or a hum? Hum is normal. Whats not normal is clicking. This kind of noise indicates a failure soon.
Ether way, back up your data immediately.

See here:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/615-backup-user-system-files.html

I would suggest starting in safe mode and see if the hard drive still acts crazy. It could be a program constantly writing to the drive causing it to be active a lot, which would cause the light to always blink.

We could work with you to determine the program that causes the issue if you would like.
You could also try a health scan.

Do you know what brand of hard drive it is? If so you could download the manufacturers drive scan tool to see if there are any problems.

 

[whs]

As a first check I would look into the Resource Manager > Disk tab to find out which processes create all this disk activity. My guess would be that most of the activity comes from system processes that write to the system logs.