Constant hard drive light blinking..

[dragonrider99]

Greetings all... I recently noticed that the hard drive light on a Gateway wirelessly connected laptop is blinking at a constant one-second rate. This seemed to start after an avast update about a week or so ago. Has anyone else seen this? I did a thorough scan and nothing was found. Followed it with a Super-Antispyware scan and an on-line scan from Trend-Micro. Again... nothing found. I also notice that the network icon blinks every couple of seconds. I assume this is from the avast webshield. I ran filemon and procmon from sysinternals and the only thing I saw was ashweb, which can account for the network icon blinking.

Any thoughts on the drive light though???

[DavidR]

Is the avast icon rotating when this HDD light is on ?

Have you checked the Task Manager to see what process might be using CPU % ?

Not sure what you mean by the network icon blinking ?
However, that isn't the web shield as any activity by that would result in the avast icon rotating.

[dragonrider99]

The avast! icon is not rotating. The network connection icon may be an artifact of the wireless connection to my DSL gateway? The lights on the gateway blink regularly, like it is verifying the connection. There does not seem to be anything overt using CPU power when this is happening. As I said, running Filemon and Procmon reveal nothing unusual. I am wondering if this might be windows indexing for search? To be honest, I only noticed it a little over a week ago. It may have been happening longer.

[DavidR]

Windows indexing I would say is a strong candidate, I have personally disabled this function on my system.

With a lack of CPU activity I would say it is mor likely an underlying process like indexing as it wouldn't be very cpu intensive.

[FreewheelinFrank]

It could be avast! VRDB doing its thing, but I think the default is for VRDB to run when the screensaver is active. Did you alter the default setting, by any chance?

It could also be a HD error: run a  scan for bad sectors:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnmore/tips/kbtip.mspx

[DavidR]

If it were the VRDB, the 'i ' icon would be visible and rotating, there would also be increased cpu activity.