HDD ACTIVITY LIGHT ALWAYS ON

[Sidevalve]

Just lately I have noticed that my HDD activity light is constantly ON. I'm running an old Celeron 466 with a TYAN MB and WIN98. The drive is a Maxtor 40 GB at 7200 rpm.

I am pretty sure that this light should NOT be on all of the time. It's partitioned into four 10 GB drives, BTW.

I ran Norton Antivirus scan on all four partitions and found nothing terrible.

I ran AD AWARE and of course found loads of crap that I deleted.

I still see this activity, although it's not making much noise... any idea what is happening here?

Many thanks in advance guys!!!

 

[bvoyek]

Is it actually always on or just most of the time? If it’s ALWAYS on the HDD LED might be on backwards. Do you have any disk defrag utilities on your system? Some of these programs run constantly in the background defraging your disk. They generally don’t eat up a lot of cpu time or take disk access from other programs but they do access the disk constantly. Does the light come on and stay on at POST or after you’re in Win98? Try booting from a floppy into DOS and see if the light’s on. If it is, then it's probably the LED or the MB. If it's not then it something that's loading w/ Win98.

 

[ejsmith2]

Yeah, the HD LED cable that runz from the light to the mainboard might be on backwards. Pull it off, turn it 180 degrees, and slap it right back across the two jumpers.


If that's not the deal, there's a couple of other possibilities. Really f'd driverz. A bent pin on the connector. And a drive that's about to take a gigantic sh*t; right on your head...

Frag it.

 

[verada]

the HDD LED is just that, a light emitting DIODE! A diode will only let current flow through it in one direction so if it is glowing, it can't be wired backwards on the motherboard!

Computers remind me of Murphy's law:- whatever can go wrong, it's always associated with a computer!

 

[Crashman]

How much RAM do you have?

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