# Why is my HD light blinking once every second?



## IanAB (Feb 7, 2000)

I am using a freshly installed version of Windows95 OSR2. I have 2 hard disks (disk1 is 850MB w/ partition1=500MB & partition2= 350MB, disk2 has 1 partition=1024MB) I have noticed that the hard drive light blinks only ONCE ever second or so. After playing with the options under the troubleshooting tab under the file system properties, I singled out the cause to be the 32 bit protected-mode disk drivers. For when I disable these drivers, the light nolonger blinks after restarting windows. It's not like it's accessing different random parts of the drive or making a swap file with random reads and writes. So, I dont think It has anything to do with virtual memory because the blinking of the light occurs chronologically ONCE EVERY second starting right when windows is done loading completely. But I could be wrong. There are no Programs running except those needed by windows itself to run. Any ideas why this is happening? Thanks!
CT


----------



## Greg Freeman (Nov 20, 1999)

Check the drive and conroller documents (perhaps the website too) to see if any error is indicated by the light blinking.
ON some HD, there is a jumper,or sometimes on the controller, these are known as "light jumpers" and can sometimes distinguish between Latched mode vs. activity mode.
Hope this helps,
Greg


----------



## Dan O (Feb 13, 1999)

You are running a virus protection program?

Or you may be running low drive space, or the hard drive could be fragmented. Windows's swap file used for caching my be fragmented itself. How much memory and free disk space do you have?

I recommend you clean up the hard drive, run ScanDisk, and Defrag using Safe Mode (depress F8 while booting).

Good luck. Dan-O


----------



## Jim Holly (Aug 4, 1999)

Hard drives, when not being accessed, will produce a blink every so often, (although every second seems a little too often for this.... mine does it every 3-4 seconds.) What it's doing, is moving the head, so it doesn't set in one spot too long, which would cause excessive heating of the sector. Although during normal running, the head isn't in actual direct contact with the platter, it still creates a bit of friction from the air cushion that floats it. This can produce heat if it stays there long enough. This occassional movement is built into the drive to protect it.


----------



## Dan O (Feb 13, 1999)

It's not normal if your PC is working properly. Dan-O


----------

