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Unexplained HDD access causing short freeze ?

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by bouhpwet

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Hello,

The situation is as follows: I acquired a new HDD (SATA) to replace a smaller IDE one. This new disk is just for data.

Although, when performing some routine tasks under WinXP, I can see (with OODLed) that "something" is accessing that drive (one of the 4 partitions I,J,K and L) for no apparent reason. And then I have to wait for 3-4 seconds (everything blocked during that time), until the reading stops.

Worse, when trying to check with ProcessExplorer what could be doing the I/O, no activity is reported by the program, even though the led is flashing bright.

Now, the old "I" partition used to contain a "test WinXP installation" (dual boot). But, in the new configuration, I went back to "single boot", and only kept the data.

Any ideas what could be causing this ?

Many thanks in advance.

4 replies

by thumbsup2

MS Office and some desktop search programs might be indexing the drive(s). What's running in the background?

by bouhpwet

Thanks for the quick reaction.

Well, all windows/office indexing stuff are turned off. I have tried with Copernic (Desktop search program) completely off, and the hard drive read issue keeps occurring.

The thing is: there is nothing special on that particular drive; and the read access seems to be "random" in the sense that it occurs on one of the 4 partitions, not always the same...

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