I just rebuilt my machine with a newer motherboard and cpu. I put in all my old stuff with exception of my hard drive. This time I put in a 120gb wd. Windows is installed... put in my programs, etc. computer is running fine with exception of a few minor things one being firefox issue I posted elsewhere which i believe to be unrelated. This problem is after the computer has been running a few minutes "maybe 5-10?" the hard drive light comes on and stays on steady. Before this point it works as normal. click a folder light comes on and goes off with unactivity. It's not downloading anything, it's not doing a virus scan, updates is turned off. I don't think the drive is even running. I checked the polarity of the cable and it's in right and plugged into correct jfp1 connector. The board is a K8N Neo V2.0 ASUS A7V8X Athlon XP 2700+ @ 2.17ghz 1GB DDR 2700 nVidia 128mb FX 5200 WD 80gb SE NEC ND-3500AG DVD R/RW

If this is a brand new instal it could be windows Indexing service running to establish it's search library. Bring up taskmanager (ctrl-alt-del) and check what processes might be running and using CPU, then visit http://www.processlibrary.com/ I used to have a signature but it disappeared and I just couldn't be bothered writing another so please feel free to ingore this.

After you have installed any Windows version from scratch, after Setup has finished you must load the drivers for your mboard, especially the main chipset drivers, so that Windows has the proper drivers for and the proper information about your mboard. Have you done that? If you haven't do that. If you have, Check your hard drive. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/... If you don't have a floppy drive, you can get a CD image diagnostic utility from most hard drive manufacturer's web sites, but obviously you would need to make a burned CD, preferably a CD-R for best compatibilty, on another computer if you need to.

I think Richard59 was correct as I opened my properties of My local disc and unchecked ndexing service. no more light on this boot and seems to be normal. Only time light comes on is when it should when I access a folder or file on the disc. It just flickers once in a while now. And yes I know I must load the drivers for my motherboard. That is the very first thing I do before anything else is find the latest drivers. The hard drive better be good! I rarely used it in a usb enclosure for backup until I built me a new file server with 600gigs of hard drive space. Thanks to both of you for all your help and input. Dummies like me need it from time to time :) MSI K8N Neo AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.21ghz 1GB DDR 3200 nVidia 128mb FX 5200 WD 120gb SE NEC ND-3500AG DVD R/RW