Harddrive Goes Crazy

[B.Valys]

Need help!

When Windows XP boots-up about 2mins later the harddrive goes crazy, constantly active for about 2-5mins. Then it's fine till the next bootup.

I've had this problem before in previous clean installments of XP but sometimes I am able to stop this from happening but don't know how.

I have also got most of my startup options unchecked in the msconfig which I thought could be the problem.

Can someone help me?

Would be very appreciated.

Thanks..Brian

[TheGorx]

what's the sound like?
is it like it's being accessed but then falls short

if this has happened before and your drive may be going

I'd be thinking of backing up right about now

or at least going to your hard drives website and getting utilites to test it

[B.Valys]

It sounds like data crunching or empting your cache. There's no bad sound like clicking or anything.

The one thing of sort of noticed is that from the clean installment the more software progs installed the longer it goes. But when it's finished it runs fine.

I have 2 drives attached:
Primary is partitioned into 2 using NTFS.
Secondary is FAT32.

They are sort of new drives no longer than 2yrs old.

[Train]

Still it would be well worth the peace of mind to download the hdd diagnostic program and run it on the hdd.
I have had bad hdds right out of the box. And we have had a bunch of folks posting about their, newer than yours, hdds going bad lately.

[B.Valys]

I download a program called Active SMART 2.31, ran it and drive status came up ok for both drives. ScanDisk the drive no errors.

[Train]

Good to hear. Now you might want to check and see what the services are doing at staartup. Restore points comes to mind that eats up hdd space too.

[anvirtualaccount]

If your problem still exist, it may be a virus that causes your hard drive to spin crazy. Because I think that I also have this problem. If you do low level format, this problem will be solved if it is a virus. You said that you have a "clean installation from Win XP", you just format your hard drive, right?

Hope this help

[B.Valys]

I not long ago did a format and installed XP. I have not ran a virus checker yet, at the moment I'm going through the services to see if I can find the problem.

If I dont solve it soon, I am going to install the OS on the slave drive and see how it goes.

Thanks for everyones help so far...

[SuperSparks]

It might be the Indexing Service - that can cause a lot of disk thrashing. If you don't need it (and frankly it uses a lot of overhead for little gain), go to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services, scroll down to the Indexing Service and set it's Startup Type to Disabled.