Whats going on with my HDD activity?!

[ashmanuk]

Hi all,

Basically my computer has started acting very strangly over the last couple of days. Boots up as normal and even works fine for varying amounts of time (anything from 5 mins to a few hours). But all of a sudden the HDD will start going mental and the whole ststem will slow to a crawl with the only way of correcting the problem being a reset.

I have checked all the classic things such as task man and there does not seem to be any programs running that shouldnt be and the CPU usage is low also (only a few %). I have also run a spyware sweep (Spybot S&D said everyting was fine) and even disconnected from the network when the problem occured(was worried someone was having a look around my computer) but none of this seems to help.

Was wondering if anyone had any other ideas of what it could be or a way of finding out as it is really starting to annoy me

Thanks for your time & any comments u might have...

btw its a partitioned 140Gb maxator HDD and is only about a year old. it is quite full (only about 10 Gig free) but i dont see why it would suddenly start behaving like it is! Cheers, ash

 

[Nodsu]

How about memory usage? Bad sectors can cause this too, you should scan the drive with the Maxblast utility.

 

[ashmanuk]

thanks

will give it a go thanks for the advice! in the mean time any1 else got any input?

 

[ashmanuk]

Hello again,

downloaded and ran powermax in both quick and advanced modes, both said that my hard disk was fine! Have not run it in burn mode yet as it looks to be very time consuming! Also, I have a feeling this is some sort of software problem (if possible) as opposed to a hard drive problem due to the way in which the problem sudddenly started.

Anyone got any more ideas about what may be causing this problem?? Also does anyone maybe know of a program which tells you what exactly a hard drive is doing or accessing?

Thanks for your help...

 

[Nodsu]

You can download filemon from www.sysinternals.com to see which files are being accessed by what programs.

 

[ashmanuk]

Cheers dude, will give that a go

 

[ashmanuk]

Problem sorted...

OK basically problem is sorted. It was either 1 of 2 things or perhapse a combination of both.

I have Bearshare running on my comp and I think that is what was causing the problem: my downloads folder (bearshare sharing directory) was just over 50Gb. I think whenever I went onto my bearshare library or were looking round my hdd windows tried to load previews of all the files in that directory which slowed everything to a crawl....Anyways I organised the directory and updated bearshare and I dont have the problem anymore! Just in case anyone ws havin a similar problem..

Thanks for your help dude :unch: