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Constantly running harddrive

By RknRlKid ·
I've come up with this problem and wonder if anyone has seen it before.

I have a Toshiba Satellite 1605 laptop. I replaced the original hard drive with a Fujitsu 12GB drive. The OS is Windows 98SE.

Here's my situation:

I started to notice a lot of drive activity, and the computer would act strangely. Mouse control would be zero; keyboard functions would work but overall performance would be very sluggish.

I thought at first it might be a virus. Scanned with Norton AV Corporate Edition 7.5, and nothing. Scanned for spyware wtih AdAware 6, plus deleted all temporary internet files. The problem persisted.

I decided to go for the radical cure, and fdisk'ed the hard drive (both regular and /mbr), and reformatted. Right at this second it is just a command prompt. BUT...the hard drive still is showing signs of constant activity.

I lean against it being a virus because the fdisk should have removed it. I am hoping that the drive isn't going physically bad.

Any suggestions/comments?

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by Cactus Pete In reply to Constantly running harddr ...

Try disabling everything that you can think of as far as software is concerned... Especially all of the scheduled tasks, and make sure nothing is logging in debug mode to the drive...

At this point, if the disk is still reading/writing a lot, you may have a bad disk or controller. Try another disk, first, just to check.

Also, make sure the OS recognizes the disk correctly in the device list.

If there is no activity when you disable or close all the processes you can think of, start adding them back in one at a time until you find the culprit.

Good luck.

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by TheChas In reply to Constantly running harddr ...

You are correct that at the DOS command prompt, there should be no hard drive activity.

It sounds like either a boot sector or BIOS virus.

The best way to check the drive, is to mount it as a slave in another PC.
(You can get 2.5 to 3.5 inch drive conversion kits from many PC parts dealers.)

To check for a BIOS virus, remove the hard drive, boot from a floppy, and see if the floppy is access.

Chas

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