February 23, 2007
Curious George: Blinking HDD Light!
I noticed the hard drive activity light on my computer was blinking every second - on the second - when I was absentmindedly staring at it and noticed it synched up with the ticking of the clock on the wall.
Thus began my strange odd-yssey to make it stop.
And yes I asked over at MeFi but don't get freaked out. We're just friends, it's you I love.
I noticed it was blinking every second - on the second - when I noticed it synched up with the ticking of the clock on the wall.
Then I wondered what was accessing the hard drive every second.
Using the Start -> Run -> msconfig utility, I've started bare-bones and run diagnostic "Disk monitor" and "Process Monitor" (and "TCP View") from the seemingly excellent Sysinternals site.
I've gotten it so Registry, File System, and Process & Thread activity is essentially stopped - but the HDD indicator light keeps blinking. Every second. Tick . . tick . . tick . .
Nothing looks out of the ordinary TCP wise . . . Spyware, malware, virus, etc. scans show it's clean . . . ???
I thought it was spyware but no processes run, no ports are open, no disk activity - just this @#! blinking light . . .
It's a 5-yr old Dell Optiblast or whatever, and afaik the HDD light didn't blink like this before
1.) open your case
2.) disconnect HDD LED
3.) ???
4.) Profit!!!
If you're running a SMART monitoring agent every 1 second, stop it.
If not, run a SMART client (like HDTune or smartmontools) and see if the drive is failing.
Also. Disconnect from the intarwebs. See if it still happens.
Google: turn off cd autorun
Windows is checking for new cd insertions once a second.
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