Hard Drive LED Staying on Solid

All -

For about the past 4 months or so my hard drive LED has been coming on and staying on solid. Usually the only way to clear it up is to either completely shut down the PC (which doesn't always work), or reboot the PC 3 or 4 times. I think it started when I upgraded my CD/RW and DVD drive, but I am not 100% certain.

From what I can tell, this usually happens when I play a file using WMP or when I copy large amounts of data from one drive to another.

So far, I have replaced my IDE cables, I recently purchased a new case, (although I didn't do this to correct this issue, but I was kind of hoping I had a pinched or shorted out wire in my old case). I have changed jumper settings on my CD Drives. My DVD drive is Master my CD/RW is Slave on the secondary IDE controller. My main hard drive (WD 60GB 7200 RPM) is primary master on the primary IDE controller. I also have a spanning volume setup with my on-board RAID controller equaling out to 35GB.

The only thing that I have not done is flash my BIOS, which I am almost certain would not cure this issue.

I have come to the conclusion that the problem lies within my hard drive, my IDE controller or the pins where I plug in the wire for the hard drive LED.

Someone did suggest setting my CD drives to "Cable Select", but for some reason that didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Any information would be greatly appreciated. This isn't a major problem, just a major annoyance that I would like to either get resolved, or know where the problem lies so that I can resolve it in the future.

Thanks in advance.

have you checked the cables for the LED's? also, it maybe your swap file that is causing this, or possibly the RAID card if you have any back up facility in place (such as mirroring?) If your Maxtor is the only drive present on the master channel, I would suggest moving the fasted CD Rom to the master controller and see if that makes any difference.

Can you post your system specifications and the os you are using?

Noo Noo,

System specs are in my signature, but in case they aren't showing up here they are.

AMD Athlon 1400 Mhz
512 MB Samsung PC2100 DDR RAM
60GB Western Digital 7200 RPM HDD
Soyo Dragon KT333 Mainboard w/Onboard RAID
Lite-On 16X DVD Drive
TDK 48X24X48 CDRW Drive
Windows XP Professional SP1

Here is another new twist. Tonight, I turned my PC on and the light would not go out no matter how many times I rebooted.

I then installed my MS Project 2002 software using my DVD-ROM and while the files were copying the light started blinking normally and after the install it went out completely. So it looks like it's tied to my DVD-ROM.

DVD-ROM is the Secondary Master, and the CD/RW is the Secondary Slave. I have tried flip-flopping them, and it does help to a certain extent but the problem is still there.

Anyone have any ideas on what I can try next? Do you think setting the drives to Cable Select would clear this up?

Thanks.

I would look at the following possibilities:

Virus
Page File sizing
Free Space on hard drive - defrag may be in order

Remove the cdrw altogether, put the hdd's on the secondary and the dvdrom as primary master...

What happens then?

Cable select is a way of not having to jumper stuff correctly. It just means that where ever the drive is put the bios will call it master or slave according to its position. It won't hurt to try.

NooNoo,

Thanks for the tips. I have solved the issue. I went to Lite-On's site and searched their discussion forums. Alot of people had this issue. It turns out that applying the latest firmware resolves this issue.

Thanks for the help.