New
#1
EFI/GPT installation constantly polling RAW partitions
Hallo,
i've installed an EFI/GPT Win7-64Bit system (EFI boot, single HDD, System Builder, untouched SP1 ISO image beside placing bootx64.efi for EFI boot).
Beside normal NTFS partitions there are 2 RAW partitions in the system (in the middle and at the end of the HDD layout - that's probably why it can be heard very well here). Once the system is up Windows starts polling every 6 seconds to the first sectors of every RAW partition and never stops. It seems it tries to identify/mount the partitions all the time or something. Not only is that head clicking every 6 seconds annoying its also additional stress for the device mechanics. Western Digital had many crashed devices due to 8 second power savings in the past. This is even 6 seconds.
The accesses can't be seen on filesystem level (Procmon, Process Explorer...) but on TaskManager/RessourceMonitor you can see the data traffic on the graph that is in sync with the HDD head clicking every 6 seconds (see picture below). You need to let the system rest some time to see this fully idle state.
There is DiskMon that monitors HDD access by LBA sectors and there you can see the sectors accessed. If you follow these sectors with Winhex you land at the beginning of the RAW partitions.
In Virtualbox with MBR and RAW partition everything seems fine. It doesn't support booting Windows in EFI mode though so i cannot test that.
I already re-installed Windows with Win7SP1 stock image and fully updated. No change at all. The only thing i can think of is GPT.
Can anyone with GPT device and RAW partition confirm the problem?
Any idea how to fix this? Is it maybe possible to disable partition detection somehow? I'm out of ideas at the moment...