hard drive light always on?

jaybird
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Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2002 9:21 pm

hard drive light always on?

Post by jaybird »

I have been having a problem with G400, dual hd display and win2000 pro.

I have been having crashes possibly related to my vid card.

However, I just noticed that prior to the "crashes" my hard drive light remains on at all times, during and after boot-up?

I have 2 drives, each on a different channel (IDE 0 and IDE 1), 0 containes dual-boot 98SE/2000 Pro plus video editing software and IDE 1 is only for video capture files. Both are ata drives, 7200 rpm, etc.,.

What causes the drive light to remain on? Drive is constantly spinning, being accessed by?

Please help, this may or may not be my "crash" problem?

Regards,

jaybird
Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

1. running out of disk space where the swap file is trying to grow / shrink
2. needs a defrag
3. back door program is sending spam email
4. hdd is dying in one spot and the system is trying to access some data over and over and over
5. microsoft's office indexing program

do you have taskinfo or similar, check what's running
http://www.iarsn.com/archive/tskinf40.zip get the older tskinf40.exe, it's easier to read
jaybird
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Post by jaybird »

1. have defragged

2. Swap file is infinate - 60 gig

3. No, no "task info" type software running

4. All utilities say hard drive ok

NOTE: doesn't always do it but is becoming more common, Re: used to only do it a little, now does it most of the time on startup or reboot.

Of interest, video problems seem related to hard drive light, Re: light on, video will crap out, system crash, hard drive light off, not likely?

ideas please!

Gigabyte dual PIII board, dual 1100 PIII's, Apollo Pro 133 chip set (yeah, I know, problems!), 1 gig of P133 SDRAM, 98SE/2000 Pro dual boot, G400 32meg dual hd vid card, SBLive 5.1 Platinum sound card.

Latest Matrox BIOS, drivers and latest Via 4 in 1 drivers.

Yes I know that this is not a BP6 problem but everyone here has been so supportive in all areas I thought I would ask! (OBTW, have BP6, dual 1100E PIII's @ 110mhz, stable for 2 years!)

Regards,

jaybird
Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

get the taskinfo, see what's running.
if you're not seti'ing, then it should be 98% idle
see what isn't idle and think about did u install it, or is it
spyware / hacker / trojan / spam related
Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

that sounds a good idea.
my friends brother has so much rubbish in his Piii 1.133 it takes 10 minutes to boot up.
everything is soooo slow.....
i left it defragging, he doesn't listen.
jaybird
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Did everything but still on!

Post by jaybird »

Ok, I did everything including filemon.exe. Neat little program, told me "DKService.exe" was running at all times (I shut everything down), even after I had deleted it (an Executive software product for managing your hard drives, works great, better than any MS product!), I still have the drive light on!

I have defragged, scanned, etc., all seems well except that my secondary drive (60 gig Maxtor) won't stop spinning! I have no programs running that I know of on this drive. I use it just for temp. storage of large AVI and mpeg2 files for video editing.

I just remembered that I am using it for my swap file, could that be it since my OS's (98SE/2000 Pro) are on one drive and my swap file is on a different physical drive it is accessing it at all times?

I can't check it right now, I'm at work 45 miles away from my PC.

Out of idea's, anyone else got any?

Regards,

jaybird
nullshark
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Post by nullshark »

Indexing Service - shows up in Services list as cisvc.exe and cidaemon.exe.

(Though that usually only runs when harddrives have been idle for a while).

First thing I'd do is change the IDE cable to the drive.
On a torpedo to Hell
ASRock 939 Dual Sata II mobo--2x 2200+--2GB RAM--ATI x800XL--2x Seagate Cheetah 15K.3s on LSI 20160 HBA--WD 400GB Caviar RE2, Maxtor 300GB, 3x Maxtor 120+ GB = 1.1TB storage--Sony Dru-820A DVDRW--Diamond Xtreme 7.1 sound--Win XP
Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

silly question, so go gulp!

what memory is showing as available ?
if you have a small mem, your swap file is used a lot, easily hence, 128 much better than 64

are your mem chips working correctly ?
jaybird
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Post by jaybird »

Haven't tried new cable yet.

I have 4 sticks PC133 256 meg of ram.

Swap file is set to max availabe (1.5 gig)

Thanks to all so far!!!! :D

OBTW, I was just surfing along, minding my own business on the net today when, WHAM! 2000 Pro desides to do a memory dump :roll:


Regards,

jaybird
jaybird
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Post by jaybird »

Haven't tried new cable yet.

I have 4 sticks PC133 256 meg of ram.

Swap file is set to max availabe (1.5 gig)

Thanks to all so far!!!! :D

OBTW, I was just surfing along, minding my own business on the net today when, WHAM! 2000 Pro desides to do a memory dump :roll:


Regards,

jaybird
jaybird
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Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2002 9:21 pm

Post by jaybird »

Haven't tried new cable yet.

I have 4 sticks PC133 256 meg of ram.

Swap file is set to max availabe (1.5 gig)

Thanks to all so far!!!! :D

OBTW, I was just surfing along, minding my own business on the net today when, WHAM! 2000 Pro desides to do a memory dump :roll:


Regards,

jaybird
Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

hate to be obvious, but you didn't answer my question.
and you triple posted.
hit submit, wait 2 seconds, close page. it works.....

now, windoze-break key
how much memory ?
not how much you 'know' you have
how much does windows shows it knows about
jaybird
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Post by jaybird »

Sorry 'bout tripple post, email is acting goofy. Waited for 5 min. and still no response.

To answer your question, windoz shows a full 1 gig of ram installed.

I have run every stress test I can throw at it and when it boots correctly it is rock stable (6 hrs of nonstop stress testing cpu's, video, sound, cd drives, floppy drive and ram).

I know that there are "issues" with Via chipsets and Matrox vid cards but I can never get it to repeat on a regular basis.

Regards,

jaybird
Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

how about ....
my computer that wouldn't post, but when it did, it worked fine, sort of, until it didn't.
while it worked fine, the voltages all showed fine.

it was, bad psu, i think the fan actually.....
with no fan, it heats up and fails, until you hit the reset button and then it works sort of ... ??

so, when it's good it is very very good, and when it's bad, blame something...
tried a new PSU ?
jaybird
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Post by jaybird »

I have already thought of that. The PS is new (one month old) and being monitored by MBM5 AS WELL AS real time external digital volt meter.

The next step will be wave form monitoring of the actual power source (line voltage).

The one thing I haven't tried yet is a MS Tool called Dumpchk.exe that allows you to read the memory dump files as to what halted the operation of the PC.

I'm in the process of learning how to use the tool as well as create more detailed memory dump logs.

Regards,

jaybird
Dave Rave
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Post by Dave Rave »

if it's a memory prob
get a memory tester and leave it running a few cycles.
look for DocMem 2,
nullshark
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Post by nullshark »

Hmm, now that I read more fully how your drives were set up, I noticed that the second drive has large avi's on it. Windows by default tries to preview avi files and can cause problems if the AVI is not "perfect."

Worth a shot:

Delete the key "InProcServer32" from
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}\

Backup your registry first, of course. I've done this myself and it has prevented Windows Explorer from hanging on malformed AVI's for me.

Oh, I'd also try moving the swap file to the first drive and see how that affects things.
The only side effect of this will be (Windows Explorer will now longer show a preview of an avi in a pane).
On a torpedo to Hell
ASRock 939 Dual Sata II mobo--2x 2200+--2GB RAM--ATI x800XL--2x Seagate Cheetah 15K.3s on LSI 20160 HBA--WD 400GB Caviar RE2, Maxtor 300GB, 3x Maxtor 120+ GB = 1.1TB storage--Sony Dru-820A DVDRW--Diamond Xtreme 7.1 sound--Win XP
davd_bob
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Post by davd_bob »

Try swap video cards if you think there is a connection...Or simpelest of all...try boot up in safe mode and see what happens.

As far as the swap file...
If you have one GIG of physical ram you should be able(temporarialy) to set the swap size to 0 maximum and be able to boot up and try run a few minor tasks or applications. That will tell you if it is swap usage related. Jeez, I use 256 physical ram and 512meg swap and get along fine with anything I do on W2K PRO. I don't do anything complex like video editing though.

good luck
There are *almost* no bad BP6s. There are mostly bad caps.

No BP6s remaining
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headseed
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Post by headseed »

I think the hard drive light is on because at the moment the system is crashing, windows is attempting to dump the log to the hard drive.

http://labmice.techtarget.com/troublesh ... ydumps.htm

Oh, and a good bootable memory tester is memtest or memtest86, google it up, download, burn the image, boot from it, and run to test memory thoroughly.

There is also a bootable version of winPE:

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/, boots you into a windows environment right from CD, and has many preinstalled utilities to help figure out what is wrong. Totally bypasses the HD in case of virii, spyware, bad sectors, etc.
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Venice 3000+ @ 2.6ghz
lots of BP6s and two VP6s all apart currently
headseed
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Post by headseed »

Just bumping this up becasue I think it got missed... see my post above^^^
Dual Barton Mobile 1.8ghz
Venice 3000+ @ 2.6ghz
lots of BP6s and two VP6s all apart currently
jaybird
Posts: 301
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2002 9:21 pm

Post by jaybird »

Please read, the system is NOT crashing!

HDD light stays on from the moment the power swith is turned on until shutdown and power off is completed!

Prior to "something" , not sure what or I would fix it!, the HDD light would ONLY be on when the drive was being accessed, now it is constant.

Regards,

jaybird
davd_bob
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Post by davd_bob »

Your not running Koppix, or somthing else that constantly uses the cd-rom drive are you?
There are *almost* no bad BP6s. There are mostly bad caps.

No BP6s remaining
Athlon 2800
Sempron 2000
ViaCPU laptop with Vista.(Works great after bumping ram to 2Gig)
P-III 850@100
headseed
Posts: 165
Joined: Thu Dec 26, 2002 5:45 pm

Post by headseed »

Just for something to try, run with a CD in the drive... audio CD, game CD, DVD (if a DVD drive), and see if that helps. I have one computer that I have a HD led problem unless a disc is in the drive. Weird I know, but it works.
Dual Barton Mobile 1.8ghz
Venice 3000+ @ 2.6ghz
lots of BP6s and two VP6s all apart currently
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