How To: Detect What Process Is Thrashing Your Hard Drive
Sep 17, 2007
Every once in a while you notice that your hard drive is working extra hard for what seems like no reason. A background process has taken your hard drive hostage, forcing it to thrash loudly as it struggles to keep up with the high rate of reads and writes. Your computer responds slowly as the process overloads the physical limitations of your drive. What are you to do?
The solution is simple, although a little tricky at times: identify and stop the process that is killing your drive. There are two methods and tools that you can use to identify the process.
Method 1 ...
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Jan 29, 2010
I have a Dell Inspiron E1705 with Vista Home Premium 32bit. My computer has been shutting down without my doing anything. When I try to reboot, it says that it cannot detect my hard drive and my computer will not start up again.
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Jul 23, 2009
I recently purchased a computer on e-bay. I did not know it was a server. I has a aid configuration. I bought Vista Basic. When I try to load it it says it does not detect any hard drives. Is there a way around this? Can Vista basic be loaded on this system?
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May 25, 2008
My system was working fine the other day, but while copying a file by nero?.the system hanged and I had to restart it. But I got a disk boot failure error. Then , I tried to run a windows xp installation CD, but that is also showing some error message during installation and the installation fails. I did check the bios settings and the disk fails to show?and had it checked on another system also? but bios cannot detect the hard disk.
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Feb 10, 2009
The Hard Drive LED light on my Sony Vaio keeps blinking EVERY SECOND. When it's really quiet I can hear it too, it's constantly writing. Constantly. I did my research - read all the threads on the net and so far I have disabled:
Windows index
Windows defender
Windows search
Superfetch
System Restore
Readyboost
Defragmenter
I have uninstalled google desktop.
The system is totally virus and spyware free, and the anti-virus is not scanning (schedule scan disabled). All Vista updates are installed. Nothing has helped. I've run out of things to disable. I'm running Vista Business SP1, Dual Core 2.2 Ghz, 3 Gb RAM.
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Feb 6, 2009
My hard disk is continuously being accessed by some process. I do not see anything on Process Explorer doing this. How do I stop beating up my hard disk? What causes this? Does indexing show up on Process Explorer.
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Feb 6, 2010
have looked through other helpful posts on here regarding the Autorun problems, having looked into that i checked all registry entries etc that were fine, however, i dont have the NoDriveTypeAutoRun where it should be all i have is
(Default)
BindDirectlyToPropertySetStorage
This doesnt seem to tie in with the write ups i have looked at and cant find the NoDriveTypeAutoRun. Also, there is no action when i insert the cdrom or dvd etc into the pc, have looked to find the manual start procedure but cant see anything in there, what drive should i be looking in?
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Apr 4, 2009
Im using Vista in my C Drive ( HDD1 Partition 1 & active partition) and I installed this XP x64 on (HDD2 Partition 2) F Drive. it doesnt detect my Vista x86 Ultimate, so no dual boot.
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Apr 14, 2009
I recently installed Vista and I'm noticing something that I can't seem to remember from XP. My hard drives are going crazy with activity at times during which there really shouldn't be any activity at all. I happen to have 4 Raptors in a RAID0+1 configuration and they sure are noisy when they start thrashing. I have 8 GB of RAM on the system so it shouldn't be the swap file. However, it seems like 25% of the time, my hard drives are going breserk with activity. Is there a tool which will allow me to break down disk activity by process?
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Jul 29, 2009
I have a ASUS laptop running Vista Home Premium, 64 bit OS. I have several programs that I use but no loner have the insall disks for. Should I have to reformat in the future I would hate to lose them. Here's what I'm thinking: Buy a extrenal hard drive. Seagate, 1Tbit, usb, cost $90.00. Copy my hard drive to it. If I need to reformat. Reinstall Vista from my recover disk that came with the computer. Then copy files from external drive. Bingo. All my old programs would be there and working. Question is: Can this be done?
What file/folders do I need to copy to the external drive?
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Mar 23, 2008
If I install XP as a virtual machine under Vista, will XP still overwrite the MBR on the system drive or is the entire XP boot process virualized?
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Mar 23, 2008
When I type anything (in fact, I think that it is AS I type anything) in the Start Menu search box, the hard disk starts thrashing, and as far as I can tell goes on forever. The system becomes very slow for other applications.
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May 27, 2008
Is it possible to copy my entire hard drive onto an external hard drive. Vista Premium, all the data, etc. and what would be a good software to accomplish this?
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Sep 27, 2008
I have an external hard drive, I reformated it so I could use Vista's backup.Now it seems that when my brother inlaw tries to put some music files(Itunes) that the hard disc is unavailable to his computer. At this stage it seems that Vista has conned me into destroying a perfectly good WD harddrive!I have created a second partion on the hard drive and I am reformatting that, as I write this, but the only formatting option seems to be this NTFS, and that is what I had already formatted the ExtHD to so I think this formatting will be to no avail!From what I can figure I need to format into FAT but I tried a quick format an ex-fat option was there, but the problem was the same. I am becoming more frustrated with Vista, seems I just keep running into things that should be simple and aren't!
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May 4, 2008
Anyone know where I could find any freeware that would troubleshoot why my hard drive thrashs for five minutes after I boot up?
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Mar 23, 2008
I don't know what's wrong. I've scanned and defragmented my system (more than once,) I've deleted some files (including some cookies, temporary internet files and my history) and I've rebooted a few times. Yet, the system still keeps thrashing. Could it be an unknown virus? Should I downgrade to Windows XP? BTW, I've had this laptop for 10 months.
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Mar 23, 2008
when booting up from a vista cd I accidentally had my usb external hard drive plugged in and the drive has been emptied and replaced by windows there are sintimental photos etc on the drive can anyone help me to restore them
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Jul 2, 2008
Does 'Local Disc' D mean it is a drive inside my machine or could it be my external hard drive?
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Apr 17, 2008
I was wonder if anyone know a solution for the following problem. I have a ethernet hard drive and I've never had a problem until using vista and windows server 2008. both operating systems are unable to browse the drive, instead it completely crashes explorer.exe. Windows server 2003 & XP have never had trouble.
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May 18, 2009
i bought a kit for an old hard drive. i got it to work once ealier today, and now it doesn't work. when i plug it into the usb, it will not successfully install. the kit is a rocketfish hd 35, the hard drive is seagate u8 model st313021a. the "remove hardware" icon appears in the tray, but no designated lettered drive appears on the computer.
the hard drive was part of an older tower that i couldn't get to boot. it's strange because just today i accessed the hard drive and located old pictures, music and other files that i hadn't seen in a few years. had i known this would have happened i would have started saving right away. i thought i had it working.
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Mar 26, 2008
I've upgraded my machine at some point in the last year, where I added a new 500GB drive and moved my C: partition across to it. The previous 250GB drive was left in for additional storage. Just recently (while upgrading my BIOS) I realised that my system was still booting from the 250GB drive even though Windows was on the other disk. There is a fair possibility in the not too distant future that I'll replace the 250GB disk with a larger disk, in which case I won't be able to boot. Is there a safe and reliable way to change it so that the system boots from the 500GB disk?
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Oct 6, 2009
I was starting my computer today (that has Vista), and during the start up process, a black screen came up stating that there was an error opening up my external hard drive and it was checking for errors. After it finally booted up, I went to open the hard drive files, and it was totally BLANK! I then restarted the computer, and still the hard drive is EMPTY! I had ALL my important files in there!
The ONLY thing that looks promising is that when I go to Start then to Computer, it shows the hard drive there, and it still shows that 43GB are free of 111GB of storage (same info shows by right clicking on it and going to Properties). Why would it show this if nothing is on the hard drive anymore? Is there ANYWAY to recover these files again you think???? I NEED those files!!!! Remember that the hard drive STILL PHYSICALLY WORKS. It's just that I cannot access the files on my pc at the time for some reason.......
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May 21, 2008
I just bought and installed a external hard drive. I am fairly knowlegable about computers but this is my first Ex. Hard drive and know very little about there use. So what I want to know is how to save my Family Tree Makers files to it. And once I do that how do I know for sure it is opening from my new drive and not my computer C: drive? I saved it to a DVD one time but when the time came when I needed it all that was there was a short cut but no files.
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Sep 8, 2009
I have Windows XP and Vista. I always go through "safely remove hardware" before pulling off USB drive on XP. However, I have been trying to do the same on Vista, it seems that I cannot do the same as XP. For instance, I plug in my USB on Vista and it appears as H drive on Vista, when I am ready to do "safely remove hardware", I don't see the device drive H is on the "Safely remove hardware" window, so I cannot stop the H drive. I am concerned about the Vista hardware.
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Apr 26, 2009
i have an older maxtor 250gb ide hard drive and i am trying to put it in my computer so i can reformat it and install vista ultimate, the thing is when i go to disk manager i can see the drve, feel the drive, but it wont let me initialize it or anything, it comes up as "the request could not be performed because of an I/O devise error, the disk was originally in my modded xbox and i could acces it with xp.
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Mar 23, 2008
I have a new pc with only 256MB of RAM- how hard is it to add memory? Also, how do I find out how many GB the hard drive is?
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Feb 14, 2009
I purchased a new hard drive and named it NEW-BACKUP. I did a exact disk copy from my old BACKUP drive. My wife uses the old drive now. I have renamed my new drive to BACKUP. I am doing complete system backup's pretty frequently. To verify that the backups are happening, I typed in the command "wbadmin get versions" and got a list of the backups. The disk name showed up as "NEW-BACKUP". "NEW-BACKUP" is the destination drive for the backup and renamed as "BACKUP.
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Oct 16, 2009
I just inserted a SD/MMC Card in my laptop, and it changed my external hard drive letter from F to G?, how can I change it back to F again?, as I had everything setup on the FRIVE, now nothing recognises it?
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Nov 22, 2008
I just installed a new hd WD500g sata to my box. Vista "sees" the new hd in device manager, but doesnt see it in "my computer. It is freshly installed and straight out of the bubble wrap,I was thinking gee, maybe it needs formatted...but i dont see that option anywhere...maybe im missing something.... i donno...first time i've run into this....usually the drives are "seen" right away.....
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Sep 29, 2008
What is the best way to add a partition to a hard drive in safe mode or in normal mode.
Thanks in advance.
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Mar 23, 2008
I recently bought a western digital 1TB hard drive which I had to reformat before I could use. Everything works good now, except for onething. Sometimes the computer doesn't want to restart while the new drive is plugged in. If I remove it from the USB port prior to restarting, it will restart just fine.
It shuts down and turns on without an issue. This only happens when I
restart the system with it plugged in.
So while it's not a big issue,it is an annoyance.
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