Flashing HD LED - No activity

[sixb0nes]

Hello,

I recently purchased a P35-DS3L Gigabyte board and have been happily chugging along. One thing I've noticed recently (not sure why I hadn't before) is that my HD LED is flashing once every second. At first I figured .. virus .. and did some scanning with DISKMON/FILEMON to determine that wasn't the case.

Next step was to reinstall, so I decided to boot up off my Windows XP install disc and let it sit at the screen where it asks if I want to setup a new install, or repair (after it has detected the CDROM and such, and says "Starting Windows" but still on the blue screen - this screen has NO HD activity, I would assume?) Well, sitting at the prompt it does the exact same thing. Flashing constantly. Went into the BIOS, doesn't blink there. HD LED registers normal I/Os fine.

The drive is IDE. I have a SATA DVD burner. Mystery to me -- any ideas?

 

[b1gapl]

I could be wrong, but this all looks normal to me. The HDD LED, flashes whenever the hard drive has activity going on. Mine flashes every second too.

(after it has detected the CDROM and such, and says "Starting Windows" but still on the blue screen - this screen has NO HD activity, I would assume?)

There would be HD activity, because the Windows installation procedure, involves putting files on to the HDD.

The BIOS wouldn't be flashing, because there is no activity during that menu, since the BIOS works from the motherboard.

 

[sixb0nes]

While I understand what you are saying, the screen I am referring to is actually a prompt waiting for me to tell it I if I want to process with a repair or install anew. It shouldn't be doing any IO at all (of course I can't guarantee that, but as I'm sitting here it has been flashing for 10 minutes every second). Also, when I was testing with DISKMON through Windows before, the LED would flash without IO registering in the program, which to me reeks of a little weirdness.

I've removed all other cables, save the power switch, to my motherboard just to be sure I didn't have anything reversed, and of course I flipped the HDD plug around too, which caused no LED to display at all.

 

[sixb0nes]

Well, I figured it out .. my unplugging rampage paid off!! =)

This is my first time with a SATA DVD-RAM (actually, SATA devices in general), but it appears to be the reason it's flashing. As soon as I remove the cable to the SATA burner, it stops flashing repeatedly. Whether that's a bug in my BIOS or a general thing that just happens with these devices with regards to the HDD LED (polling of some type maybe?) I'm not sure I'll ever know .. anyone out there have a SATA burner?