Why is my HD "LED" constantly flickering?

I have a WD800JB special edition HD. I am running WinXP Home. My HD led flickers constantly, even when there is nothing running. If I close everything, nothing is running in the background, (did ctrl-alt-delete) checked the sys try, etc.. and the led still flickers. I even unplugged my cat5 cable and it still flickers. Any ideas why this is happening?

WELCOME TO THE FORUMS!!!!!

My computer had almost the exact same problem (mine was on 24/7), and it turned out to be caused by the CD drive. I would disconnect the IDE cable from your CD drives (CD-RW/DVD, ect) and see if it still is blinking after you start up the computer. If it is, I don't know what to say really. If it's not, you can ignore it because the CD drive is just being weird.

JigPu

Are you sure your anti-virus program isn't doing a background scan? Win XP likes to do drive indexing too or it might also be your swap file...

Since nt 4 windows has a tendency to "get board" as my school technician put it it move files about by itself and catalogues files.

JigPu said:

WELCOME TO THE FORUMS!!!!!

My computer had almost the exact same problem (mine was on 24/7), and it turned out to be caused by the CD drive. I would disconnect the IDE cable from your CD drives (CD-RW/DVD, ect) and see if it still is blinking after you start up the computer. If it is, I don't know what to say really. If it's not, you can ignore it because the CD drive is just being weird.

JigPu

Click to expand...

JigPu my HD is the ONLY thing on my primary IDE. My CD drive is connected to its on IDE cable on the secondary IDE. Could this still happen considering my configuration?

Since nt 4 windows has a tendency to "get board" as my school technician put it it move files about by itself and catalogues files.

Click to expand...

well one thing is every so often doing it when your sitting there idle - but it shouldnt be doing it constantly unless you using it pretty heavily...is there actually any performance hit your seeing with this?

could try messing around with page filing settings, perhaps the page file itself has become fragmented so maybe run disk defrag - but apart from that I have never really come across a solid cure for this - and I think I have seen about 3 threads on it in these forums before, never remember it being solved (whether the user sorted it and just never came back I dont know)