Why does my disc suddenly start scanning like crazy

[zubo]

Hi all,

This is driving me crazy - well the noise is....

Windows 7 Ultimate eval copy build 7100, dloaded from MS site 6 weeks ago.
Installed fine.
All was ok until last week

I could not load anything when I switched on, the hard disc light was flashing but had a black monitor, tried rebooting, always the same, tried rebooting in safe mode, loaded lots of files then stopped. Finally I rebooted and win7 loaded.

Then I noticed that suddenly my hard disc started spinning like crazy for 5 minutes at a time, slowing down to normal speed for a while and its been like that ever since. I had a similar problem on my Vista setup and one of the HiJackThis forums talked me through getting rid of the Trojan, but the tools they recommend using do not work on Win7.

Other symptoms are sometimes slow response time typing, or slow launch of an application - almost as if my keystrokes are being tracked. Also one of the other strange things is if I load Explorer, the folder bar at the top has a crawling green progress bar as if it is loading the contents of the folder - I can see the contents but cannot do anything until the green bar finishes. Another problem is that hijackthis shows the hosts localhost is set to ::1 Localhost and yet when I look in windows/system hosts looks fine...

weird

I suspected a Trojan/Virus but I have tried Trojan Remover, Stopzilla Scotty and I use Nod32 AV and nothing is showing as a problem. Malwarebyte antimalware is taking ages to run but at 24260 Objects scanned has picked nothing up.

I am wondering if in fact it isnt a virus or trojan but win7 file indexing going a little crazy. I seem to recall in Vista switching indexing off....

Anyone help please????

thanks

george

 

[AllMac]

Since this happened on Vista as well, It could be that your hard disk is failing, therefore, W7 having problems reading/writing to and from the disk.

 

[7Dreams]

try microosft security essentials...how old is the computer

 

[thefabe]

also it would help if you would fill out your system specs in your user cp.

 

[holo88]

+1 on system specs. that ALWAYS helps

my drive tends to be noisy too. seagtate barracuda somthingoranother. its loud, but its a common thing with my particular drive, so says google. moving on.

sounds like you might have the drive set to index, well everything. or you could have massive fragmentation of the filesystem. that would explain the slow speed, and so on.
try a defrag, a diskcheck, and checkout how your indexing options are setup. (control panal, indexing options. there will be a list) and dont forget to fill out your specs, so to help rule out any of the commons, and get a diagnosis or the problem.

 

[rover3500]

have u done a checkdisk aswell,like holo88 suggested?And like i just told someone else,check ur hd cables to make sure they're plugged in properly,and don't have any hairline splits in them(especially if u've been doing something inside the computer,some cables are not that sturdy)
Try disabling windows search temporarily in services(or keep it off if u don't search for files,i don't)
If it still does it,go to task manager,performance,resource monitor,disk,and see if u can find out there if there is any software that is hogging ur disk.as someone said,process explorer is good for that,just adjust columns to show disk usage.
Of course ur disk could be on its way out,as allmac says,or it may be overheating aswell.Hope helped in some way,i know how these things can drive me mad trying to find out what it is.
Please let us know if u find out.

 

[Captain Zero]

This kind of 'problem' generally concerns me. I'm funny that way, having lost my (un)fair share of drives.

In this case, I suspect the drive, itself. Something appears to be triggering a repair operation within the OS. Possibly a bad set of headers, but a thorough checkdsk is in order. Barring that, I'd suggest either A; a system restore for testing purposes or B; a fresh install.

On the off chance you have >4GB of RAM, you could try disabling the pagefile.

 

[zubo]

thanks everyone,
I filled my spec in, the pc is a laptop about 12 months old so I dont think its the hard drive. I disabled indexing and removed a few things and seems better now.

I'll try a chkdsk and/or defrag

george