Hard drive runs constantly even in safe mode

I am trouble shooting my sister's Compaq desk top PC. It is running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.

It has a WDC WD50 00AAKS-65V0A SCSI Disk Device - 465.76 GB hard drive with 6 Gig of memory. All available updates are installed.


The hard drive never stops running, even in Safe Mode. I have tried disabling Start UP programs and it has not helped. How do I find the cause?



What info do I need to attach to help find the problem?


AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 240 Processor

PEGATRON CORPORATION Narra6

BIOS Date: 01/07/10 11:37:11 Ver: 5.17
6.00 GB 5.75 GB usable
WDC WD50 00AAKS-65V0A SCSI Disk Device
(1) AMD High Definition Audio Device (2) Realtek High Definition Audio

(1) ATI Radeon HD 2400 Series (2) NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit 7601 Multiprocessor Free Service Pack 1

Paul Black said:

Hi den942,



What do the Processes show?

Will this help?

Paul Black said:

Hi den942,



What is WU set to?

What is WU and where is it? If you mean Windows Update, It is set to Check for Updates but let me choose whether to download and install them. I tried Never Check for Updates but it did not stopp the hard drive running...

ControlCenter4 is probably set as a service or it's made to make its self bootable all the time. Have a look at Autoruns and under the Everything tab search for ControlCenter4.

To see what is using a hard drive IO. Go into Task Manager and under the View options select "Select Columns." Now check off I/O Reads and I/O Writes. Now in Task Manager hit the I/O Reads and/or the I/O Writes tab to sort from highest.

Autoruns for Windows - Windows Sysinternals | Microsoft Docs

Startup Control Panel allows you to add start up items, but I don't think Autoruns allows you to.