I want to know what keeps my hard drive busy when I am not using my computer. I turn on my vista ultimate computer. I do not do anything but sometimes I see that the light indicating that the hd is busy is blinking, maybe for an hour...Now it can be that defragment is on, indexing is on, virus scan is on....Nope, I shut down all these services and still something keeps my hd busy. I want to know this. I want to know what is acessing my hard drive. I cannot check infer anything from the task manager memory use list. Nothing really is keeping my cpu busy there, but something is keepng my hard drive busy. Is there a program that can tell me what is accessing my hard drive? This blinking light will make me go insane.
I have noticed that my hard drive is busy doing something even while the computer is idle. I can't figure out what it is. I have turned off indexing, Windows Defender, and my system doesn't come with shadowing. (Windows Home Premium). I don't have any visible background programs running, (no antivirus programs, etc). The system restore is scheduled to happen daily, not all day long every day. Screen savers are turned off. Powering down is turned off. The computer is not connected to the internet. So what the heck is the computer doing when it's left idle? Why is it still grinding away computing something?
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.
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?
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?
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!
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
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.
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.
I use the cpu-meter gadget in my sidebar and find it useful. Sometimes my cpu seems to be very busy even when I am doing very little. How do I find what the cpu is doing ?
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?
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.......
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.
When I attempt to delete the program I go to (programs and features) after I open it is does not response and the cpu seem to be used High and all cores 100% busy even If I close (programs and features) the cpu still busy and never stops even If leave it for more than 3 hours - like what I did - and same proplem the cpu still busy! and this happed only if I open (programs and features) !
I am not sure what is going on, but I think it may be an over-aggressive registry cleaner. I am running Vista Ultimate 64 and every time I get an open file dialog box, and try to open the menu at the top of it to select the way I want to view the folder contents (List, Details, Thumbnails, etc.) the button stays depressed and after a few seconds I get the Server Busy... Switch To | Retry | Cancel... dialog. The Cancel button is always grayed out. The list always comes up eventually, after several hundred Retry clicks... If I do not move the mouse I do not get the Server Busy dialog, but it takes 30-45 seconds for the list to appear. After that everything works fine. I am running Vista Ultimate 64-bit on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5000+ @ 2.6GHz with 3GB RAM and an nVidia GTS8600.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.....
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.
i just bought a new laptop and the 140 gig hd came partitioned into (2) 70 gig drives. Is it possible to enlarge the C drive and shrink the D drive at the same time?
My current C drive has a corrupt system on it (Vista) It needs to be formated and the system reinstalled. I am considering installing a larger capacity drive as the primary (C) drive , install the system on that and use the current drive as extra storage space while keeping some of the data that is currently on it thus not reformatting it. My question is, when the computer boots will it automatically boot to the new C drive or, as the system will now be on both drives, will it confuse itself?
Also. as my system disk is from from the mfr of the computer, I believe it does not have any of the Vista service packs on it. Once formated with this disk should I then get SP1 and SP2 and install them? In that order I presume or will SP2 alone suffice? Where can I get SP1 and 2?
I am contemplating getting a new Hard Drive (bigger, of course by a large margin!) and with the problems I have had with activation in the past, despite being a bloody genuine copy (calm down, Philip, calm down) - how can I go about activating on a new hard drive without experiencing the same c**p I have in the past (last one just needed to type in serial and it was activated, but the 2nd time I had to go via Indian call centre and was on FORTY FIVE MINUTES FFS !!!!....calm down, lad...calm....) So....is there a way to avoid chatting with Sanjay in Bangalore ?
I've just finished my friend's new pc today and I will be using the HDD from his old pc in the new one. Now I was wondering whether I can just install the old one in the new pc, or whether I should format it to delete everything. There's windows XP on it.. So, can I just take it out of the old one and plug it into the new or not
last week i was recoding some video's using Nero's Recode program (sidenote worked great) but now my 100 gig laptop on has 2 gigs of space left from the original 60 gigs free space. where did it go?? the video files have been deleted, i've used the disc clean-up program to remove the temp files and used the registry to enable Pagefiles removeal from another post of this forum. that clean up some on the space i now have 20gigs free space but i still am missing 40 more gigs that i have before i starting the recodeing.
in my disk de-fragmenter is shows me that i have a huge "yellow" portion of paging files still left and by just guessing it should be that extra 40 gigs just by seeing the size of the "yellow" bar.
how do i get rid of these "paging files" and how do i reclaim my lost space?
I just Bought a 120Gig External HardDrive and i want to put An O/S on it how do i do that? i bought an external HDD because all my PC games take up all my HDD space in my computer :P)
I got a large external hard drive today and it's instructions say to go to disk management and do format and partition. I messed up and deleted the drives volume. Now it is not listed in disk management. I looked everywhere to get it back and can't figure it out. How do I make Vista recognize this drive again so I can partition and format it?