All Drive access slow/CDROM keeps blinking

[Enochroot]

I have an AMD Athlon 700 on a Gigabyte Mbd with Maxtor
60gb drive, TEAC CDROM writer, running Win 98SE using
the AMD drivers for IDE drives.

Here's the weirdness - After boot up , when you try to
open "my computer" it opens with a blank screen (no
drive icons) that sits for almost 2 minutes before
the drive stops frantically accessing and the icons appear!
I have defragged the drive which has no effect -
the other strange thing is the CDROM access LED keeps
pinging rhythmically every second like something is trying to access it - with or without a disc in the drive.
(I have dealt with this in SCSI chains but never seen
this in a no-SCSI system!)

I have tried shutting of all but the minimum in the system tray ( I normally run Zone Alarm Pro and Norton Antivirus)
it makes no difference. I also ran Norton Windoctor and
Full viruscan came up with nothing. If I leave the CPU
monitor on I notice the usage never drops all the way down
(most systems it will get down to 1-3% with nothing going on
this one keeps up around 8% and bouncing around - like
something is running in the backround that does not show
up when you hit "ctrl/alt/del". I boot into "safe mode" and the drive runs faster in "msdos compatability mode"!!
"My Computer" opens way faster and there is no pinging
of the CDROM drive...
How can I determine what is running invisible?

Thanks in advance for your time and thanks to all for the
great info I have gotten from the people in this forum!

 

[Win98User]

I have seen this when programmes such as datakeeper are trying to access a damaged/bad/corrupted cdrw disks.

From what you say that isn't the prob.

Try booting the pc with the cdrw tray open (if it closes just open it again).

If things are fine, then check your connections to the motherboard.

Please let us know how you go on.

 

[Enochroot]

Tried the door open boot...no effect. I checked the
seating of the cable recently when I had it open
for a new fan. Thanks for the idea tho'!

 

[Win98User]

A chap called cdogg posted the following link in another thread "Help - "Swapfile in use" increasing until computer freezes" - it may be of help in seeing what else is running;

http://download.com.com/3000-2094-6771750.html?tag=lst-0-11

Be aware that it is a cpu heavy application.

 

[Enochroot]

I downloaded it and will give it a whirl thanks for the lead! Will report back results.

 

[Enochroot]

That utility is very cool! I identified some HP printer
stuff that seemed to be bugging the CPU with rhythmic
requests, but did not stop the "pinging" of my CDROM drive.
It must be a Windows driver since the pinging stops in
Safe Mode...

 

[rtshort]

The CD ROM Drivers are not loaded in SafeMode. Very few drivers are loaded in SafeMode. Rob
Just my $.02.