Hard drive "blink" and "blink" and "blink"

[kayofcircles]

My husband and son installed a game last week that apparently has played havoc with hubby's puter. Error messages all over the place in many programs, so we suspect that we'll have to erase and begin again. But we notice a hard drive light "blink"...approx once a second. What causes that? We've tried shutting down everything except for Explorer and Systray and still the "blink". I am asking the question partly for immediate problem, but also for future troubleshooting.

[iropnman]

the only reason the hard drive light would blink is if something is trying to access the hard drive foronereason or another as far as the errors go if you are runningwindows 98 you can run a system file checker to try to fix these errors before you reload to do this left click the start button and then left click on run when the box pops up type in sfc then hit the ok button when the next window pops up click on the settings button after the nxt window opens click on the search criteria tab in the window inthe middle of the next frame make sure to include all folders you do this by highlighting each one that says no and then clicking the include subfolder button for each item not not allready included after they are all included hit the apply button and then ok this will take you back to the first window all you have to do now is click on the start button then if you have to restore somefiles it will prompt you to do sofromyour windows disk but if you are running anything but windows 98 or 98se you will not find this option to do a system file checker

[BigBlue66]

Hi Kay,

Hey, did ya run a virus scan on the game CD before installing? If not, you might want to run a scan on the harddrive.

If no viruses, and in order to find out what's causing the disk access, try this: First, I assume you're running WIN98. Go to System Information and expand the Software Environment category. Next, check the Running Tasks. See if there is something you don't recognize or that you do recognize but shouldn't be running.

Have you tried uninstalling the game to see if that helps? Of course, then you would have to run a registry cleaner. Which reminds me, if this happened in the last four or five days, boot to a Command Prompt Only and type the following:

Scanreg /Restore

Pick a date before the game was installed and choose to restore that registry.

Cheers,

Big Blue 66

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Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
- Pamela Vault Starr

[ranchdog]

Hi Kay....

Many Thankie's for the Christmas Card.

The LED does the Happy Dance because somthing is writing
to the HDD. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif

The game that was installed contained an executable file
of some sort (.exe) and it is driving everything crazy. And
continually "looping" data to he HDD. Was the game down-
loaded off the internet? Possible virus.

Can you boot up in Safe Mode and un-install the game?

Good Luck .... Holiday Greetings!!

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....How long is a minute... depends on which side of the Bathroom door you're on. ......Indecision may or may not be my problem......
..........

[kayofcircles]

Regrets first. When son arrived with (please, God!) future daughter-in-law and store bought game, I was busy chatting with her and forgot to remind guys to use Sea's (recommended) Test Run. Secondly, I did (!) tell beloved that you guys had taught me about the "Scanreg /Restore" and to do that (have directions printed)..but he has a Norton Utilities program in his and did all sorts of things with it that appears to have made problem worse rather than better, and so he is now beyond the five backup copies. He uninstalled game almost immediately (after clearing up monitor problem where three quarters of screen had vanished..???), and has been in Safe mode several times. My best theory is that the Registry is pretty screwed up, and he doesn't really have anything on hard drive to "lose" so starting over is just the time/aggravation of having to do so. Since he will get a "whole" day off tomorrow and Tuesday..lol..he will have time to fool with it. Plus, we're hoping that the Ghost program arrives soon because we thought we might try the Restore CD thing.

Anyway, all that is by the by. Just wanted confirmation on hard drive blink..that's what we thought, but did have some minor concerns on maybe electrical type problem or something. Thanks, BigBlue..didn't know about the Running Tasks section. We did look in Sys Info to discover that half the puter was reconfigured (sheesh!) on the night of the game installation, but didn't check Running Tasks. And my paranoid parts are slightly freaked...one needs to run a virus scan on a store bought game??
And thanks too, iropnman, for input and welcome to Forum. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

"The LED does the Happy Dance because something is writing to the HDD" Like that, Ranchdog, nice turn of phrase.

[Gallaeglagh]

. And my paranoid parts are slightly freaked...one needs to run a virus scan on a store bought game??

They had some viruses recently on cd rom games I believe it was in Europe


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When in doubt search on Google

[kayofcircles]

Thanks, Gallaeglagh..will run a scan in future. And, like duh.. hopefully remember to use the Test Run. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

[sea69]

hey kay

light blinking now and then could be due to you having a screen saver or power management setting. Turn OFF your screensaver (put "none") and undo power saving settings, for the light blinking issue.

as for Test Run, I don't know why it wasn't included in win9x!

iropnman- can you PLEASE get a grip and add some punctuation??- it appears that you know what you are saying, please make it a bit easier for the rest of us to decipher??

computer help is hard to follow for some people to begin with, and I am not without fault here on spellling issues, but we MUST be carefull to give correct, CLEAR, and CONSISE instructions on things or we will be causing more problems to an already frustrated participant.

no offense intended.

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif


edit:..lol- I spelled "spellling" wrong.. see?

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sea1_69@hotmail.com

homepage (http://www.seanweb1.homestead.com/3.html)


[This message has been edited by sea69 (edited 12-29-2001).]

[BigBlue66]

Hey, I didn't get no Christmas card. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/tongue.gif

Anyhoo Kay, there is an option somewhere to set the no. of backup copies that ScanReg keeps to greater than just five. Can't remember how to get there right now. Maybe somebody knows. I think that would be awfully convenient, don't you?

Cheers,

Big Blue 66


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Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.
- Pamela Vault Starr

[Hardtek1976]

Big Blue:

Hope these links help http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,36589,00.asp http://www.pcworld.com/resource/zoom.asp

Start/Run, type in "scanreg.ini" , it should open in notepad. Change the value of MaxBackupCopies to any number 1 - 99 . This is for Win98se

_____________________________

Ron

[ranchdog]

Thanks Ron

There ya go.... Teach me something again.
Big Fella you need to stop in more often.


http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

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....How long is a minute... depends on which side of the Bathroom door you're on. ......Indecision may or may not be my problem......
..........

[RKBA]

Boy, did I just have a fun couple of hours (NOT!). I had posted about this same subject over at Blinking Hard Drive Activity Light? (http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/Forum8/HTML/000446.html) in October, and after having tried everything suggested both there and here, I decided I was going to nail down the sucker that was accessing my hard drive. I have an 1.1 GHz Athlon T-Bird with an Asus A7V MB, 768 MB RAM, and four Hard Drives totaling 166 GB, two of which run in parallel in a RAID0 configuration using a Promise Fastrack controller card. The two drives running in parallel contain the OS partitions I use (Linux, Win98, Win2000, and WinXP) and is the disk access light that blinks. The other two drives are mostly for backup.

My primary hard drive(s) light blinks about every 10 seconds both in Win98 and Win2000 (I normally use Win2000). Since there is more control over running processes in Win2000 than in Win98 (there are lots of processes running in the background in Win98 that you can't see with the simple Ctrl-Alt-Del process viewer), I decided to track down the problem in Win2000. So after shutting down all applications and the programs in the task tray, I started shutting down all the processes that taskmanager would allow me to shut down within the taskmanager itself, watching the hard drive activity light after shutting down each process.

No luck, the disk drive light would still blink every 10 seconds. So next I opened up Services in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools and began stopping each service that was running one by one, watching the hard drive light after stopping each of them. I had closed down every service except for six that the Service Manager program wouldn't allow me to stop (Alerter, Event Log, Plug and Play, RPC, Security Accounts Manager, and WMI Driver Extensions). Although the Service Manager wouldn't let me stop them, it would however allow me to set their status to "disabled". So that's what I did, thinking that I could set their status back to "Automatic" startup after I had solved the mystery (I figured I could re-enable them from safe mode even if Win2000 wouldn't boot up normally after having disabled those last six services). Then I rebooted.

Well, I was right... Windows wouldn't boot up. Instead it would die at the log on screen, although it wasn't completely frozen because the mouse pointer would still move. The most frustrating thing about it was that while the system was sitting there frozen, the damn hard drive light would still blink every 10 seconds!!! So anyhow, I booted up in safe mode and went to set the properties of the six service routines I had disabled back to "Automatic" startup. Guess what happened when I selected "Properties" for one of the services -- Up pops an error message window saying "Plug and Play is disabled"! Well, DUH, yes of course it was disabled because I had disabled it. Apparently it's needed in order to set the properties of the services in Service Manager for some strange reason. At that point I was beginning to get a little worried, and the !@#$%^&* hard drive light was still blinking even in safe mode. Oh sure, I had backed up the Win2000 directory recently, but I always hate to restore it in it's entirety because I always loose some of the settings I've made since it was backed up. After trying to figure out where the driver service properties were stored, I decided to look in the Registry and luckily they weren't too difficult to find. It did take a couple of tries to get them enabled by changing their registry settings, because there are four different places the settings are stored. I found out by trial and error that the only place that really counts is "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es." The three other places they're stored in is a similar path except using ControlSet002, ControlSet003, and ControlSet004 instead of "CurrentControlSet" and the others are apparently mirrors of CurrentControlSet because once you change CurrentControlSet the others seem to be set accordingly.

So finally after a couple more reboots, Win2000 is back up and running normally, and the hard drive light is still blinking every 10 seconds. I might believe it was some automatic function of the Promise Raid Controller those drives are connected to, except that the drive activity light doesn't blink all the time in either Linux or DOS.

Maybe I should submit this to that TV program called "Unsolved Mysteries." http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

-- Ron Dotson
(A different Ron)

[This message has been edited by RKBA (edited 12-30-2001).]

[Rick]

If you submit it to them.

Ask why it also does it on a NON Raid system.
Yup My system does the same thing
With only 2 HDD’s connected to primary
Nothing connected to the raid controller
Only my lite blinks every 2 or 3 seconds Just not very bright
I’ve learned to ignore it

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To ERR is HUMAN
To REALLY screw things UP, YOU NEED a COMPUTER !

[RKBA]

Oh the blinking doesn't bother me, it's just that I wonder if it's preventing the drives from spinning down after an hour or so of non-use. That's what I have the power saver setting set for; ie, to turn off the hard drives if not accessed for an hour, although the light blinks even when I have power saving disabled altogether.

I had one of the Raid drives go out after less than a year of use, and at that time I didn't have any complete system backups on-line, just my own stuff on CD-RW disks. It was a real hassle to restore everything because I had to go out and buy another set of matched drives, reformat everything, reinstall the OS's from scratch, etc. At the same time I bought the forth drive so I'd have enough room to quickly copy everything (entire partitions) from the Raid drives onto the backup hard drives so they would be easy to restore in case of another failure. I make a backup copy of the Raid partitions every month or so.

Normally hard drives last for several years before failure, so maybe I just got a bad one (they were IBM-DTLA 30GB drives). The other one of the original pair that I now use for backup is still going strong. I never actually power off the computer because I'm running a "Prime95" prime number search program in the background, but I'd like the hard drives to power down when not in use to save wear and tear on the bearings. If I had a stethoscope maybe I could use it to hear whether or not the Raid drives ever stop spinning, or maybe tap into the drive current power feed to see if it ever goes to zero next time I have the cover off. The computer itself only consumes about 100 watts when the monitor is turned off (the video monitor consumes about 50 watts). Not much point though since there's apparently nothing I can do about it anyhow. The blinking light could just indicate some sort of status information going back and forth between the controller and the drive electronics without necessarily accessing any data on the drive surface.

I'm pretty sure it's a result of some "service pack" that I've installed in the last few months, because I don't recall the light blinking right after I bought the computer. Seems like it only started a few months ago. Anyhow, it just makes me really curious as to what's causing it.

-- Ron

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Centerfire (http://home.pacbell.net/rsdotson/) ‘‘The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’’ -- Thomas Jefferson

[John0904]

My wife was having the same problem for several years now (and a hard drive later). Till today though. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif
I too tried in vain to fix this problem and was hoping to find the answer in this thread.

I did some searhing and come to find out if I turned off Auto insert notification on all CD drives, the activity light does not blink! Woot!

On my system I usually leave the Auto insert notification off anyway and never had this problem. I'll start my CD when I'm good and ready. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

This may or may not work for you all, but it worked for me.
It's worth a shot.

Report back with your findings. Thanks.

BTW, hard drive connected to IDE and not SCSI nor a raid system.
Results may differ.

[kayofcircles]

John0904: Thanks, good suggestion and makes sense on one puter we used to have when we were newbies..we never figured out the "blink" and like Rick said above, just ignored it.

Hardtek1976 : Thanks for reminding me. Pretty sure I have instructions printed up somewhere (!) on setting the number of backup copies, although I cannot remember if one can set for more copies than 5 in 98.

RKBA: "Good luck" is all I can contribute..80 per cent of what you said you've already tried sailed right over my head.

Husband has reinstalled Windows and mobo drivers and so forth and so on. Had a brief flurry of modem difficulties..Windows kept trying to reinstall modem every time he booted and would demand driver..but he just got that fixed. Anyway, hard drive light no longer blinking. Long way around to get to problem solved, but learned things in the process. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

[BigBlue66]

Thanks a heap, Hardtek. I'm going to make those changes right now, 'cause I have a bad habit of making new changes almost every day. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

Cheers,

Big Blue 66


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Once I thought I made a mistake, but I was wrong.

[BigBlue66]

Hey,

How about submitting this problem to TechTV Screensavers, Kay?

Cheers,

BB 66


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Once I thought I made a mistake, but I was wrong.

[rond36]

I have three words Windows Swap File I think every ones hard drive light blinks. The more memory you have the less it blinks but it still blinks. You should only worry if it comes on and stays on for an extended period of time or frequent long periods of activity.

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I think Windows XP and Microsoft use more of my bandwidth than I do!

[RKBA]

John0904,

I'm glad turning off Auto-Insert notification worked for you, unfortunately it did not for me. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/frown.gif I set "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Cdrom\Autorun" in my registry to zero, and still have Das Blinkin Lights!

_______________________________

rond36,

And I have one word for you: NOT! Thanks for the suggestion, and it is a good one (although the swap file is only needed when new applications or data are being loaded into physical RAM and there isn't enough room, so the swapfile wouldn't normally be used when the machine is sitting there idle). In any case, although it's not possible to disable the swap file in Win2000, it is possible in Win98 and that's just what I did - I disabled it. Guess what? The !@#$%^&* light still blinks every 9 or 10 seconds! Nice try, but no cigar. Also, I have two different disk activity lights. The first (green light) is for the two drives in the Raid0 array, and the second (yellow light) is for the two drives that are connected to the ATA/EIDE channels on the motherboard. The OS's all run from the Raid0 drives, but I have the swap files set up to reside on a drive on one of the ATA/EIDE channels, and the green Raid0 light is the one that blinks.

During all this however, I did happen to boot into Windows 98 in Safe Mode and noticed that the light did not blink in Windows 98 safe mode (although it does blink in Windows 2000 safe mode). Sometime when I'm really bored, I'll try to find out what drivers are running in Win98 normal mode that aren't running in Win98 safe mode. One thing I'm aware of is that the disk drives all run in "Compatibility Mode" when running in Win98 safe mode, so I suspect it has something to do with the disk driver's, but of course there are also lots of other differences between safe mode and normal mode.

Any other guesses?

-- Ron

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Centerfire (http://home.pacbell.net/rsdotson/) ‘‘The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.’’ -- Thomas Jefferson

[John0904]

RKBA,

I looked under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es" and did not see a Cdrom or Autorun string.
I turned my off from the Device Manager under the CD hardware. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

I do have Windows 98 first edition though so it could be different.

[kayofcircles]

John0904: I have 98 original too, and was told by both HP techs (for troubleshooting a CD writer) and Sony techs (newer CD writer) to turn off Auto Insert Notification and AutoRun. Someone who I cannot remember said that if it's on, then OS had to keep "checking" which makes a certain amount of sense, but truth is that I don't care. The techs told me to do that, and I did. Plus, like you, I don't like CDs opening by themselves anyway. I like to look them over first.