How can I tell which processes are accessing an ext HD ?

bonzodog2

I have an external HD. Its access light keeps flashing, but I'm not (ATM) running any p2p software. How can I find which process is doing the access ? Running WinXP SP2.

ressem

Process Monitor (ProcMon) from the Microsoft Sysinternals Suite will help.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027.aspx

zodac

I'm pretty sure XP has this function....

Open Task Manager and go to the "Performance" tab. Click "Resource Manager". Under the "Disk" tab, you'll see a section called "Disk Activity". One of the headings is called "File". If the driver letter is the letter of your Externam Hard Drive, that process is accessing that drive.

bonzodog2

zodac wrote: »

I'm pretty sure XP has this function....

Open Task Manager and go to the "Performance" tab. Click "Resource Manager". Under the "Disk" tab, you'll see a section called "Disk Activity". One of the headings is called "File". If the driver letter is the letter of your Externam Hard Drive, that process is accessing that drive.

I can't see a "Resource Manager" button on the "Performance" tab.

ressem

Nope, Resource Manager is in Vista and later, unless it's somewhere as a download.

zodac

bonzodog2 wrote: »

I can't see a "Resource Manager" button on the "Performance" tab.

ressem wrote: »

Nope, Resource Manager is in Vista and later, unless it's somewhere as a download.

Bah, how about Start> Run> perfmon.exe?

ressem

Perfmon will give you counters for Disk reads per second and similar stats, or process I/O read bytes per second etc.

Is there a way of getting it to report the particular processes reading/writing to a particular device?

ProcMon would be a lot quicker I'd say.
You get a list of processes and what they are doing. Click the buttons in the menu to filter to only view disk accesses.
It'll tell you what processes are accessing what files, and whether it's reading, writing or whatever.

zodac

ressem wrote: »

Perfmon will give you counters for Disk reads per second and similar stats, or process I/O read bytes per second etc.

Is there a way of getting it to report the particular processes reading/writing to a particular device?

ProcMon would be a lot quicker I'd say.
You get a list of processes and what they are doing. Click the buttons in the menu to filter to only view disk accesses.
It'll tell you what processes are accessing what files, and whether it's reading, writing or whatever.

Ok fair enough; been a while since I've used XP.

God I love Win7.

bonzodog2

OK, thanks for your help. Procmon didn't do much for me; maybe its because the NTFS is F**KED up on that disk. I'm trying to remove stuff from it and not write any new files. I used RegMon and FileMon before, didn't realise they'd merged.

ressem

If NTFS is having problems then the disk access is likely autochk being run automatically by windows because the file system is in a 'dirty' state.