Hard Drive activity light constantly blinking - new WIN7 Ultimate Dell PC

Anonymous

I've been troubleshooting this problem off and on for weeks on my brand new WIN-7 64 Ultimate Dell XPS 8000 (I7-860 1TB HD 8GB Ram). Searching around has found many recommendations and a couple of resolved issues, (more non-resolved), but none of the recommendations has helped me.

I got a feeling that this may be a Dell-specific issue, but I got no response in the Dell forums. I'm sure if I call Dell support, all I will get is recommendation to put it back to factory default. no thanks!

I have disabled all the suspects, at least temporarily to see if it has an affect:

Windows Indexing & Search

Windows Firewall

Windows Defender

System Restore

Remote Differential Compression

Windows Fax & Scan

Superfetch

Seaport

With all these off, the blinking was clearly less busy, but there was still a steady heartbeat type of blink. I since re-enabled Defender and System Restore. (Even if they were to blame, that is hardly an acceptable solution/workaround!!!)

I've studied disk activity in PERFMON and there is some occasional kernel activity and event logging. I took a couple of window snapshots I can post (if I can figure how). I also created HijackThis log.

Sometimes the disk activity PERFMON window is blank but yet the light continues to blink!!! huh???

I have not disabled hibernate (there was a suggestion somewhere it could be involved). I use it regularly. But I can try that too you think it might help.

I am at my wits end and a little overwhelmed at all the data to study and search for. I hate diddling with services and the registry, fearful of getting in over my head and creating a mess I can't get out of.

Also, there is no additional security software and I did not install any preinstalled trial crapola.

Help!!!!!!!!

I will post the hijack this log in the next post

Update to clarify: What I reported above is basically about out-of-the-box behavior... not application or CPU-bound related. The system was pretty clean with minimal extra software/hardware installed.

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Anonymous

Hard drive light blinks quckly because Microsoft does what is called something like Write Cache Flushing ... flushes disk drive writes that might be in that cache to disk? Simple.

The reason is .. if you have a power failure.. you will lose some data from that cache and/or corrupt something that may be important. Takes a hit on drive performance and life expectancy too. So some of the experts say.

If you have a battery backup.. or most laptops with a battery can.. Disable it!

.. In device manager the hard drive properties usually has a check box for enable write caching .. and some will have another check box... Disable Microsoft Write Cache Flushing. < add a check to that guys box...now look at your non very often blinking Hdd light... works same with some of the DVD/CD drives, same controllers probably. .

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46 additional answers

Anonymous

2012-03-26T02:46:56+00:00

holy **** that once every second LED flash was killing me. it would blink whether or not there was any thing happening. Yes, of course i turned off Indexing/Defrag/Whateverelseicouldthinkof, and there was no Antivirus installed. the damn thing still beat like a heartbeat. i timed the blinking for 60 seconds, and sure as sunni it was 60 blinks. THEN I DISABLED the CD/DVD drive (in Device Manager), and VOILA!!! thanks to whoever it was on page four that figured it out. now i just have the irregular HDD activity every few odd seconds. Process Explorer shows that as being Process: "System" ... and it's something to do with paging.
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Anonymous

2012-06-10T08:39:43+00:00

Mine blinks every second too ! New Gateway DX4820 , Seagate, 750 GB , blinked since I took it out of the box ... any suggestions ?

If it blinks every second, this may be the CD/DVD drive pulse which is perfectly normal depending on your system, what these guys are referring to is a constant HDD LED lit up, and a very slow system because of it.

I am working on a Dell PC atm takes 10-20 mins to get to Windows desktop and a futher 10 mins to settle down to where you can use it, still trying to fix it, maybe a malware infection, running ComboFix on it at the moment as I'm sure its infection based as the drive works fine in my docking station.
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