Strange HDD Behavior

For the last hour or so I have been trying to figure out why my HDD light was blinking non-stopped (yes, I heard the HDD spinning). I had installed this new Antivirus program, then HP auto updated and one of those updates was to BIOS version f.14 (sort of just did it - couldn't seem to stop it).

Anyway, shortly thereafter, that's when the HDD went nuts. First I thought it was the AV software, so I uninstalled that - no good ... still nuts ... closed programs, checked the task manager - no strange programs running ... after over about an hour of looking all over the place to try and figure out if something was running in the background (Windows defender, etc.), it just STOPPED ... no rhyme or reason - it just decided it was done. What the HECK was going on?!?!

 

could have been indexing the hard drive. indexing is what windows uses to catalog the location of files on the hard disk so you can have faster searches. uses up resources, and doesn't really make for very much faster searches. system restore could have been running as well. these two services are the cause of a lot of hard drive thrashing. my two cents.

 

And that just starts and stops whenever it wants, without letting you know it's doing it for up to an hour? Vista should let you know why your hard drive is going crazy!!! Ugh - I figured it might be something like that, but in previous versions of windows, there was usually a way to find out what was going on if your HDD was doing things.

Is indexing new to Vista? And can I turn it off if it's not necessary?

 

yes, it just starts up on its own. an hour is an awful long time, though. indexing may be just part of the problem...

no, it's not new to vista. xp did it too. you can turn it off. go to start/run/ then enter services.msc. find it in the list of services and disable it if you like. after that, right click on c: and select properties. uncheck index this drive for faster searches. tell it to do c: subfolders and files. then hit ignore all when the first prompt comes up. windows cannot change the properties of some files, that is why you will have to hit ignore all.

disable indexing and see if that helps. note that it will take awhile to change the properties of all the files on the hard drive (from indexing to non-indexing), this is normal.

 

Well, before it started doing that, I had uninstalled Norton AV, because it came preinstalled and I wanted to use a free, less invasive antivirus software.

It might have also had something to do with HP updating the BIOS?

Thanks for the info though.

 

no norton is a brilliant idea. it took me forever to uninstall it from a dell 1520.

i don't think a bios update would cause an hour of hard drive thrashing, but i suppose it's possible. i've never had such an issue from a bios update...

 

Yeah - it was definitely strange, because it's never done anything like that, but it's been fine today, so it was probably some serious indexing - I had recently transferred music files and stuff over my network from my old computer and it was late at night. When I look at most of the scheduling for Windows Update and other such automated processes, the times set are like 12AM - 3AM.

I also may not have noticed the indexing in XP, because the only machine I have running XP is my desktop and I never turn that off (laptop is only on when I use it). It probably did indexing (and many other things) without me knowing.