Hard drive being very annoying - need some help.

[AHuan]

Anybody know how to change the location of a file on the physical HD surface?

I used a prog called "filedog" (http://www.download.com/FileDog/3000-20 ... ag=lst-0-1)
to see why my hard drive keeps making a highly annoying clank every few seconds, and is a result of explorer.exe accessing and writing to "software.log".

So, I looked that up on google, and apparently it's part of the registry. @$@^%. When the hard drive is busy it's quiet, though. I thought maybe the head is just doing a huge seek (it's pretty loud though). in which case I could move the location of the file.

The whole computer is used but not too much so it 's highly unlikely to be the HD failing.

[tomh009]

software.log is actually an on-disk copy of a registry hive; I believe that it corresponds to either HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE.

So some application on your system is continuously updating the registry, and that's causing Windows to keep writing copies to that file.

[AHuan]

Yes, explorer.exe apparently. Actually, it's only doing open and close operations, not write operations, so something is accessing it but not writing.
Any ideas on how to fix it?
This is not a normal seek sound - you can hardly hear the hard drive when opening programs or something. Maybe the hard drive is turning on and off or something, or the head is retracting. I keep my computer in my room and need it to set off alarms etc. so I don't want to turn it off and it being noisy is bad.

[AHuan]

I still haven't been able to solve this. I have a recording here of the sound - maybe someone can recognise it. Anyone? As mentioned above, the process called explorer.exe is accessing software.log. Actually my trial period ran out for filedog and it's doesn't seem to be telling me the process name anymore, but I seem to have established that in the past.

Anyway, It's highly annoying, it's at about the frequency you hear in the recording, sometimes it happens more often, and it's constant, whenever I'm trying to read on the computer or something. Very annoying.

I mean, accessing a file is one thing, but it shouldn't make this sort of noise. Why is it doing this?

Maybe the head is docking and un-docking for some reason? The hard drive is turning on or off ? Anyone else hear that noise sometimes? What did you do?


Edit- how do I post a file?

[AHuan]

okay, here it is

http://myfreefilehosting.com/f/9bc7b274b0_3.75MB

you might have to turn your volume up, but the first click happens at about 3.25 sec and happens a few times. In practice it usually happens more frequently than this.

Anybody recognise that sound?

[AHuan]

I've started a thread on a different forum, and it seems to be getting somewhere:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthr ... ost2698403