What is accessing my Hard Drives? 1

[svankley]

I have a couple Dell Laptops running Win XP SP1a. Both machines have times when there is serious, crippling drive activity, which usually lasts about 10-15 minutes and then drops off rapidly after that to normal activity levels. I have run Perfmon, Process Explorer and a few other utilities. I still can't determine what is causing all the drive activity.
Does anyone know of any utilities that will display what program or process is accessing the drive (and what files it is accessing)? I have searched high and wide on the net and haven't been able to uncover any. Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

Steve

 

[pmonett]

In WinXp you have the Performance Monitor, which is rather good for an MS system app. That can tell you waht processes are running and who is using the CPU.
Do you have System Restore enabled ? Check in the Services panel if you are not sure. System Restore is very much the kind of stealth app that pounces on your disk when you don't expect it to, at least it appears to do so unless you tweak the settings.

 

[collisba]

You may also have Indexing enabled.. It is supposed to only kick off when the processor is idle, but that's not always the case. Also check your virus software. Often that will start up at the worst time, and suck down the performance of your machine.

Brian

 

[svankley]

Yes, system restore is enabled but I tested that by disabling it (the problem persisted), as I also disabled the indexing service (problem persisted). The 'System Idle Process' stayed >90% this whole time so the bottleneck isn't the CPU.
As mentioned before, I have tried Performance Monitor (PerfMon), but that won't show what is accessing the drive.
That's what I'd like to find is some App that will show what is currently accessing the drive, whether is be the System Restore, Indexing Services or any other program or service.

Thanks for the suggestions though,

Steve

 

[svankley]

I don't mean to be repetative, but I don't feel my problem really is performance per se - it's drive activity. The CPU seems to constantly have >90% Idle time so the CPU is just sitting around - I feel my problem is solely the hard drives fault. I really appreciate the suggestions but it seems eveyone is focusing on performance (i.e. CPU issues) and I can validate that the problem is definately with the drive activity.

Steve

 

[pmonett]

No, I do not think we are focusing on CPU performance. The thing is, it is usually a good bet that when something is hogging the drive, the CPU will go up.
That not being the case, we have a mystery task here.
I recall having heard something like that before. I'll try to dig that out tomorrow.

 

[bcastner]

See if the behavior changes is you disable S.M.A.R.T. hard drive support in the BIOS.

 

[Frontieron31s]

I am having a very similar problemwith Windows Me. The problem seems to be occuring most often when aol 8.0 is active. It is a write to the C: drive, when i try to check the disk using Norton System Works, It will not to an appropriate scan due to the error "Restarting due to disk write" I have tried reinstalling Aol. 8.0, and that does not do a thing. I need some help here guys. As Svankley said in a previous post, it seems to be a problem with the C: drive and "Explorer" Extreme lagging and performance loss occurs.

 

[NLitton]

An old computer died on me, and I need to access something on its hard drive. I tried connecting it to a working computer, and placing it as a slave, but I can't seem to get that to work. I am not sure why the computer died in the first place, and it could have been the hard drive, but if possible i need to get to the info.

Does any one have any ideas about a way of getting it off the HD?

Thanks.

 

[edfair]

Probably would be better if you started a new thread.

They sometimes die and the only way to get stuff back is to pay a recovery company to open it up and fix the problem.

While you are contemplating the new thread you might document the following:

Shows/doesn't show in bios.
Feel like it is spinning.

Both are significant.

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[svankley]

Any other ideas anyone - I'm still having the problem. Pmonett, did you have any luck finding that info?

Steve

 

[SYAR2003]

Open task manager .
Select view - select columns.
Check I/O writes , and I/O reads .
Click on the I/O Writes column to bring it on the top
Then sit tight and watch .

SYAR

 

[pmonett]

svankley,

sorry, but I cannot find any link anymore to that subject. I guess the forum it was in was scratched (it wasn't on Tek-Tips).

Pascal.