The  HD drive indicator light seems to just keep blinking at a
regulare rate with nothing is happening. No processes seem to be
running but the light just keeps on blinking. The is on a computer I
just built. Everything else seems to  work just  fine. ( Abit VA  10
MB, XP 2000 processor, HD, DVD CD R/W combo drive. It also appears if
I remove the DVD CD drive the light will not blink.

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Clarification of Question by willybear-ga on 14 Apr 2004 13:45 PDT

The problem seems to boil down to the dvd cd r/w. I  am using a maxtor
HD but  it happens with other HD. When the he DVD CD R/W  ( I happen
to be using an AOPEN put the same thing happens with other DVD'd )  is
installed the HD will blink at about once per second. If I take out
the DVD CD RW and install a memorx CD RW the light will not blink.

When I open the tray for my NEC DVD+RW, the hard drive light is on
full blast the whole time the tray is sliding - in either direction. 
I checked, and there is no process hogging resources, so I just
chaulked it off the burner.  The system doesn't get slow at the time
either.

Hi willybear!

I am not certain of this, but one thing I think could be the reason is
a wrongfully connected HDD led cable. Try referring to your manual and
double check that you have put the cable on the right 2/3 pins.

-Trym

Lots of things going on behind the scene, so it's normal for HD to
blink every few seconds.  As long as you don't hear lots of noise,
it's OK.

Otherwise, clean up unused software.  Check Task Manager, Processes to
see who is busy.  You can also check: My Computer, Properties,
Hardware, Device Driver, Hard Drives, Properties, Policies, Enable
Write Cache.

Are the HD and DVD/CD-RW on the same IDE channel, if so you can check
the master/slave configuration of each.  I don't know if this would
cause the HD light to blink but you could check it.  Another thing you
can look at is your burning software.  Some burning software have a
little agent that start on boot up that monitors the drive for a blank
cd to start thier program.  This might be why the light blinks when
you have the Drive attached and it does not blink when you detach it.

Who is the hard drive manufacture?

Do you have indexing service turned on?

The error you are making is thinking that the LED is the hard drive
light. You should think of it as the IDE activity indicator. So, as
heavylee is experiencing anything at all on the IDE bus turns the
light on. So, simply having a cd or any other removable drive on the
IDE bus (though usually only the primary bus) is cause for some
operating systems to keeps asking if media is present. So, as you can
see many things may constantly ask about the drive and its contents.
Perhaps it will blink less often with media inserted.

I think the best way to find out what's going on with the drive, is to
use filemon (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/filemon.shtml).
This great free tool lets you see all the file access requests. So if
the drive must read or write anything, it'll show up in filemon. Of
course, it spots also file usage by anti-virus and defrag
applications. There is a powerfull filter too. It's worth a try!

Try using different IDS channels for your Hard Drive and CD/DVD drive.
Set the HDD on the Primary Master and the CD/DVD on the Secondary
Master.