What is it that's booting up my external hard drives?

NoN said:

Found that tutorial that might help you trace events:

Devices - See Devices that are able to Wake Up the Computer

Also, is there some "Allow Wake Timers" set in your power plan settings turned ON?

That's a neat CMD script matey but it seems to be in relation to waking the computer from sleep status (same with the "Allow Wake Timers" setting), in my case the computer is still running as normal (just sitting idle while I'm AFK).

Gonna have to go through the processes one by one me thinks. I'll start with Norton, that seems most plausible!

Cheers.

Ex_Brit said:

Could it be Windows Defragger?

Hmmmm... Had a look but it seems to be disabled from scheduled runs.



Could it be active elsewhere do you think? Windows Defender is disabled also...

Ex_Brit said:

Do you have any software that looks for files? I was just wracking my brains to think what the heck this would be, sorry I can't be of more help.

Yeah, it's a tough one mate. Got me stumped so far... Can't think what else could be responsible, there's nothing obvious at present anyway. I'll start with Norton and report back with results. Thanks for the input!

Ex_Brit said:

Could be the real-time scanning in Norton.

Turns out you can't fully disable Norton... In order to exit the program completely I would need to uninstall it (last resort!).

I'll try running "Silent Mode" first and foremost. This cancels all alerts/background scans. Fingers crossed!

Progress! I stumbled upon the "Resource Monitor" earlier which does pretty much exactly what I was looking for.



As you can see, it was "svchost.exe" which caused the G:\ drive (Western Digital) to wake. I can't find this "$Mft" directory present on the drive, however.

Both "Show hidden files and folders" and "Hide protected Operating System files" are set accordingly so I can't quite out why this is the case...

Anyone any ideas?