Hard drive runs continuously

This line

"The answers so far have been overthinking the issue."

seems to be for the original poster and this one

"So don't make it so hard, and suggest things that may be scanning or indexing the HD for so long..."

for the respondents.


Are you trying to offer anything in the way of help or just being critical of those who have tried to so far? Unless an expert can sit down in front of someone's PC, have direct dialog with the user, duplicate the issue, and have access to the necessary diagnostic tools, a quick and easy fix is unlikely. What's offered here is a range of experiences that can assist a person to find and fix their own problems. Real learning depends more on discovering solutions rather than having them handed to you. Even suggestions that seem to be "off the mark" for this issue could be helpful at a later time.

The suggestions so far:

<b>do you have the HD set to turn off if idle for a certain period of time? If so, change the setting to "never". These are found in the screen saver tab of display properties and under the power settings. As well, make sure the system standby setting is also set to "never". Make sure the power connection to the HD is solid. It might also be useful to run the HD manufacturer's non-destructive disk diagnostics routine. Also download MemTest and check your RAM. If it has bad memory locations, your system may lock up or give errors. </b>

It's not a power saving issue. It happens at startup. Why would WinXP be going to a power saving mode and spinning down the HD at startup. Besides, the OP stated that the drive was accessing.

<b>Well I suspect, that The problem is more of a performance problem, that the hard drive problem, although do try to run the disk diagnostics of your HDD manufacturer</b>

probably closer to the truth. Older systems, loaded with a lot of startup items take longer to boot, but several minutes? Disk diags won't solve this, now will it?

<b>This will or should stop fluctuations in the electricity from damaging your PC. Also run some tests on that HD as others suggested.</b>

Power fluctuations? Now where did that come from?

So what do we have? Likely a system underpowered (CPU, not electrically) and with too many startup processes. I would look into things that do an index of the drive: Acronis DiskImage, the new NERO suite, MS Office, and some AV/Anti-trojan stuff (BOClean, Windows defender, etc). that may do indexing of the HD after a non-standard shutdown.

Perhaps you might consider just giving helpful advice to the one asking for it rather than spend your time looking for faults in other's suggestions. This isn't a contest to see who's the smartest and can provide the best answers. It's an opportunity to share knowledge and grow in it as well. My response is off topic because I notice your name is new here and want to be helpful....honestly.

No, I found the thread because my system behaves very similar at startup. Fortunately, I have some skills as to resolving my problem. The advice that was offered the OP would just take him further from where he should go to resolve his issue.

After about 12 hours of running continuously, the HD now runs normally. It is as if there was a cycle to complete or some of the RAM was not functioning. I don't know the reason; I was astonished. I thought my laptop was a goner. But after this continuous start cycle was completed, the laptop operated normally, updated the programs through the internet, and now functions as it should. I would certainly like to understand what happened. As it stands now, it is a mystery to me.