Constant harddrive activity, x60s

[Jackal]

The harddrive of my x60s is constantly showing activity in idle state (the LED blinks once every second, and I can hear the harddrive working). Is this a common problem? I can't seem to resolve it, have tried almost everything. Would really appreciate some help with this.

My old notebook never had this problem, and it might just be something that this newer notebook does. Anyhow, thought I'd take a chance and ask here.

J

[tomh009]

Run Task Manager. Click on View > Select Columns, and check off I?O Read Bytes and I/O Write Bytes. Click OK. Now resize Task Manager so that you can see those columns -- and watch.

Which processes are continuously reading or writing to disk?

[Jackal]

Run Task Manager. Click on View > Select Columns, and check off I?O Read Bytes and I/O Write Bytes. Click OK. Now resize Task Manager so that you can see those columns -- and watch.

Which processes are continuously reading or writing to disk?

Thank you for the quick reply.

That would be the antivirus, firewall, lsass.exe and csrss.exe. Assuming the last two are windows vital processes.

Shutting down the antivirus and firewall doesn't change the harddrive being accessed and the LED does not stop blinking.

J

[pianowizard]

I wonder if turning off the paging file would help.

[Jackal]

I wonder if turning off the paging file would help.

Had no effect I'm afraid, thanks anyway.

J

[tomh009]

That would be the antivirus, firewall, lsass.exe and csrss.exe. Assuming the last two are windows vital processes. Shutting down the antivirus and firewall doesn't change the harddrive being accessed and the LED does not stop blinking.

Do you have the IBM Message Center running? If you do, can you try shutting that down?

[Jackal]

Do you have the IBM Message Center running? If you do, can you try shutting that down?

Can't find it, probably not running. Any idea what it might be called in msconfig --> services/autostart?

Do you think a system restore will work? I can't recall having these problems when I first bought my notebook (1 week ago). Its most likely something I've installed (or some tweak that I've done) thats causing the problem.

J

[tomh009]

Two more possibilities to check:

1. If you are using an Ultrabase (or have an external CD/DVD burner connected), uncheck the "Enable CD recording on this drive" in the CD/DVD drive's properties.

2. Shut down IBM Access Connections, if you are using it.

Does either one of these make a difference?

[Jackal]

Does either one of these make a difference?

Didnt make any change. Should I be worried that it might be a hardware error? Will do a back-up just in case...

Really appreciate all your help, I guess that a system restore will fix the problem.

J

[tomh009]

Before you go to that trouble, try killing all the processes in task manager that are running under your own user ID, one at a time, to see if one of them is inducing the disk activity. Maybe skip explorer.exe and taskmgr.exe, though.

[lev]

Maybe it's this?
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=31906

[Jackal]

lev: thank you for reply, but didnt solve it.

Havent had the time for a system restore yet, but I'm just wondering out of curiosity: are csrss.exe and lsass.exe supposed to constantly access the harddrive (csrss.exe constantly reads, while lsass.exe both reads/writes). My work laptop didnt do this with the same frequency as my thinkpad. Maybe the cause is a factory preset from lenovo?

Just a thought, really want to solve this... or I might use this as an excuse for getting a 7200 rpm 100gb drive instead

J

[lev]

lev: thank you for reply, but didnt solve it.

Havent had the time for a system restore yet, but I'm just wondering out of curiosity: are csrss.exe and lsass.exe supposed to constantly access the harddrive (csrss.exe constantly reads, while lsass.exe both reads/writes). My work laptop didnt do this with the same frequency as my thinkpad. Maybe the cause is a factory preset from lenovo?

You already got rid of ThinkVantage Away Manager, as mentioned in the thread I linked. Do you have rescue and recovery set to automatically make backups? Or maybe you set up the disk defragmenter to work in the background, or you have google desktop search or the microsoft content indexer trawling over your disk. Those would certainly access the hard drive.

You might find sysinternals filemon useful for figuring out what is accessing the hard drive and which files it is writing. You'll want to strip your running processes to the bare minimum though, to avoid being swamped in data (even an idle system is doing a lot of disk access).

On what basis do you think csrss.exe and lsass.exe are acessing the disk? If you just mean IO Reads and IO writes in task manager, then yes you'll often see csrss reading 200 bytes/sec or so and lsass writing about that much, but it's not actually io that's going to the disk, it's just due to the way the NT kernel does it's accounting.

Lev

[tomh009]

Havent had the time for a system restore yet, but I'm just wondering out of curiosity: are csrss.exe and lsass.exe supposed to constantly access the harddrive (csrss.exe constantly reads, while lsass.exe both reads/writes). My work laptop didnt do this with the same frequency as my thinkpad. Maybe the cause is a factory preset from lenovo?

No, they really should not be doing that; something is triggering them into doing that I/O. Did you try eliminating your processes one by one identify the culprit?

[Jackal]

Hello again, and thank you both for answers.

It seems that there are 2 processes regularly (every other second) accessing the harddrive:

C:\WINDOWS\System32\svchost.exe -k netsvcs

(C:\WINDOWS\system32\wbem\Repository\FS\INDEX.BTR and INDEX.MAP)

and

C:\Program\ThinkPad\UTILIT~1\PWRMGRTR.DLL,PwrMgrBkGndMonitor

Both these applications are afaik kind of important, and shouldnt be shut down.

From shutting down processes I've realised that the firewall and antivirus are partly responsible for the problem, since the light blinks less frequently when these programs are turned off. It still blinks though, once every other second.

Another thing, the light blinks like a christmas tree when idling with firefox in the background, due to some sessionstore application (of which I know nothing about).

About rescue and recovery: I'm not sure what setting I have, but it doesnt seem to be running in the background. I've uninstalled diskeeper light and have no google desktop or indexing service (assuming thats what you meant by microsoft content indexer).

At least I can be almost sure that Im not dealing with a faulty harddrive

Really have to thank you again for all the response, havent gotten this kind of help any other place I've posted.

J