squirrels in the attic

[dcouzin]

XP is running just this one application and yet there are 56 processes running. One process pumps the hard drive approximately once a second. I hear its annoying scratching sound reminiscent of when I heard squirrels gnawing at the rafters. Will this process shorten the life of the drive? I defrag'ed, hoping it would allow the process to read or write data more gracefully, but it didn't help. So how does one track down the restless process? Windows Task Manager only shows RAM usage, not hard drive access. More than half my RAM is available. Page file usage is steady at 422 MB. Is there a utility which which shows which processes access the hard drive second to second? Are certain processes known to do this? Thanks

[jdhurst]

If someone has such a utility, I hope they post.

I had this once (years ago, caused by an interaction between Instant Messenger and consumer-grade Norton Internet Security 2003 {long gone}). Here is how I tracked it down.

Turn off the computer, and cold-start it. Wait for it to load completely. Either run nothing or run just your one application.

Now run Windows Search (standard search, not the new fast one) and search for the very newest files. Sort the list by date/time. Take a look and you just might see the file (or files) that is being accessed.

It is by no means a sure-fire technique, but it has helped me find such gremlins.

Having said all that, my hard drive doesn't make any noises even when working hard.
... JDH

[icantux]

You could try a proggy called "What Process?", since renamed to "Process Explorer".

Thing lists all the running processes, you can see what they're linked to (incl. DLL's, etc), memory usage, frequency of usage, etc... Neat little program.

Look for "Process Explorer" in this page:


http://tinyurl.com/2dx6ac

Hope this helps!

[dcouzin]

Thanks guys. Process Explorer will be useful. I think the culprit was the IBM power controller authored by our dear Lenovo.

[jdhurst]

Thanks guys. Process Explorer will be useful. I think the culprit was the IBM power controller authored by our dear Lenovo.

Strange if true. That application has never caused untoward disk accesses on any Thinkpad I have owned (A22e -> T41). .... JDH

[aaa]

Sysinternals DiskMon or FileMon (one of them)

They're the ones who made Process Explorer as well.

[dcouzin]

jdhurst was right that it wasn't the IBM power controller.
After running FileMon and seeing how much disk activity is apparently normal, jdhurst's comment about his hard drive making no noise (unless it was a private joke about a solid state hard drive) makes me wonder if my 3 year old Fujitsu is just getting noisy. It tests OK, but I can clone to a similar newer drive and see if that one sounds different.

[yak]

I would use the Process Monitor.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysi ... 96645.aspx

It shows you a live log of all processes and files they are currently accessing.

[rbena]

...makes me wonder if my 3 year old Fujitsu is just getting noisy. It tests OK, but I can clone to a similar newer drive and see if that one sounds different.

Lots of Hdd advancements in three years, and may want an increase in capacity as well ...though I seem to fill every drive, regardless of the capacity

Acronis True Image is an excellent cloning utility (do a forum search for using this program). It allows manual setting of hard drive partitions and file type, prior to doing the clone. Also has good success with retaining the hidden recovery partition, or you can delete this after making a set of recovery discs, in order to gain more space.