HD Light Always Blinking

[EdP]

Dell T3400; Win XP Pro SP2; 3.25GB RAM

The HD light blinks about once per second and never appears to take a rest. I don't like to have my hard drives working continuously, so I tried to find out what's causing it.

Using Process Explorer, I saw that Intel's Iaanotif was doing a ton of disk activity for no apparent reason, so I disabled it using services.msc. Light still blinking.

Then I turned off indexing using the drive's Properties sheet and made sure the service was disabled. Light still blinking.

Any ideas what else might be doing this?

Thanks
EdP

[EzyStvy]

It's probably the System Idle Process...

[EdP]

Thanks, Ezy

I thought the system idle process was just an indicator of the amount of system resources not being used, ie, it does not do anything and therefore does not use any resources itself.

What does it have to do with HD usage?

EdP

[shadowpr]

Could it be your antivirus in the background?

[THIERRY]

EdP my friend there is countless reasons why a HDD led light blinks :Likely it's just the indexing service trying to make future searches faster, but there are lots of other services that could be doing something.That's what you did but unsuccessful.It could also indicate your drive is going bad, and the IDE controller is busy updating the bad-sectors list; if your drive and BIOS support SMART, check for any unusual messages there.If you have very limited ram, it could be memory swapping to disk, but that's not the case in point because you have a lot a RAM. You might also consider defragging your HDD and initiate check disk options for fix of file system error and attempt recovery of bad disk sector.Furthermore it could be CD polling if your HDD share the same IDE cable with the CD drive(don't know if your system has been mounted like that and try turning off Automatic-Insert Notification and/or disable AutoPlay for the CD drive).And the last resort, it's a sign of Virus or Horses; you probably have a keystroke logger/trojan set to write your keystrokes to the disk every second. Run a full scan of your entire system to eliminate that possibility. I hope that's would make a difference.
Thanks a lot.

Thierry.

[EdP]

Thanks for your input, Thierry.

I'll try each of your suggestions that I haven't already tried.

EdP