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Is there a software program to show what is the activity running on my computer hard drive?

I have several computers that just recently became very slow. I've ran anti-virus scan - clean. I ran anti-spyware - clean. Here is the symptoms. I power on the computer (Windows 2000 but also happens on Windows 98) It boots up and I login. It finishes the bootup, I turn on task man to watch my cpu usage which never goes beyond 3%, but my hard drive light light is solid and I can hear it working on something. Whatever the HD is "crunching on" I can't fine. I launch WORD, which takes 3-4 minutes. I try to type and the letters appear secopnds after I've typed them. By this time the computer has been up for 10 minutes. Then all of the sudden the HD activity stops and WORD and all other apps work great. Then, at what seams to be random times, the HD activity goes full again but task man still shows no CPU usage. This happens whether I have the netowk cable plugged in or not (thus ruling out Internet activity)

Is there some software program I can install to see what my HD is doing?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Callandor

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octothorpe

The fact your CPU usage is really low but the system is slow may indicate that you have a rootkit installed on your machine... they hide their own usage so you can't see what's really happening.

One giveaway is that the total CPU usage doesn't add up to (near) 100%.

There's a good tool for detecting them:
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/RootkitRevealer.html

The other thing I'd look for would be disk errors in the system log.

---- octo

m-hwang

Sometimes it's the anti-virus scanner doing something crazy. See if it still happens after turning it off.

dcsdave

Check for scheduled tasks (Defrag, virus scan etc...).

P2P stuff? File sharing etc...

Run a scandisk and check for errors. Typically though if a HD is stuck on a file it will give a cyclic redundance error or something.

Good Luck.

Bob Vaal

ASKER

Thanks for all the sugessted ideas. The one that helped me lead to the fix was from Callandor. I was able to use the DiskMON and FileMON programs I found on the link Callandor submitted to find the program (worm I guess) that was running hidden from any of my normal troubleshooting systems.