Thinkpads Forum

I have a new T400 running Win XP. The hard disk pulses on and off at about 1 second intervals. Forever. Even when booted in Safe Mode. Lenovo's repair was to re-install VISTA. That worked for the disk, but not for me. When I reinstalled XP, the problem resumed.
Passes all diagnostic tests. The only think that turns off the hard disk is disabling or removing the DVDRAM drive. I tried updating the DVD driver and firmware for that but no updates were available. Any suggestions?

Do you have windows desktop search installed and indexing your hard drive? What about virus protection?

As a test, try disabling autorun on your optical drive.

File indexing is turned off.

I tried disabling autorun in the registry but that didnt help.

In the install/unistall list, I found an application called 'drag & drop to disk'. I uninstalled that and the disk seems to have quieted down. Not sure what that app does or whether I will miss it. Unfortunately, I also got rid of rescue/recovery at the same time so that might have been the culprit. I wasnt planning to use r/r anyway.

I had a simlar problem on my T61 and by viewing which processes were accessing the drive (through task manager, for example) I narrowed it down to some of the wireless networking-related processes (csrss.exe and lsass.exe). I can't remember the fix but I found it by googling. The HDD still pulses every 5-10 seconds but I suspect that might be down to AV, firewall, and RnR software.

I understand how infuriating it can be.

If you haven't turned it off, it could also be that the HD is being defragmented while your computer is idle.

how do you turn continual defragmentation off? I never knew it could be turned on... I simply run a full defrag every month or so.

pipspeak wrote:how do you turn continual defragmentation off? I never knew it could be turned on... I simply run a full defrag every month or so.

It is not continual, it´s scheduled. Check scheduled tasks or, alternatively, Disk Defrag under System Tools and disable "Run on a schedule" (you could also change the schedule).

Hope this helps

Marin

pipspeak wrote:how do you turn continual defragmentation off? I never knew it could be turned on... I simply run a full defrag every month or so.

There is probably an easier way than what I describe here (but I wouldn't know). What you need is TweakUI from MS. It allows you to set many things that otherwise can only be changed by modifying the registry directly. Within TweakUI, there is a section called "General" and then there is a check box for "Optimize hard disk while idle", which is checked by default. Uncheck that check box. BTW: as far as I know, this is different from the defragmentation that you can schedule with the Windows scheduler.