Hard drive runs at random, but no light and no record of drive/file access

One or more times per minute the hard drive will run for about 5-10 seconds,
but the hard drive light does not come on during this time. I can make it
stop by opening OR closing almost any file (including text documents, OE, or
web pages). I have used "diskmon" and "filemon" utilities from the
following page, and nothing shows up when this happens--no special file
read/writes and no disk activity:
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml

I have tried turning off a variety of things, like virus programs, spybot,
update managers, etc. But even if these things were the cause, it seems
like it should show up in these disk monitoring programs.

A second issue is the hard drive seems to be accessed excessively (sometimes
on and off every second or two).

Is my hard drive near death, or do I have some virus (did plenty of checking
for that)?

Add-on:

This is relatively new hardware (whole PC), but it did not do this when new.


"Carl." wrote in message
...
One or more times per minute the hard drive will run for about 5-10
seconds, but the hard drive light does not come on during this time. I
can make it stop by opening OR closing almost any file (including text
documents, OE, or web pages). I have used "diskmon" and "filemon"
utilities from the following page, and nothing shows up when this
happens--no special file read/writes and no disk activity:
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml

I have tried turning off a variety of things, like virus programs, spybot,
update managers, etc. But even if these things were the cause, it seems
like it should show up in these disk monitoring programs.

A second issue is the hard drive seems to be accessed excessively
(sometimes on and off every second or two).

Is my hard drive near death, or do I have some virus (did plenty of
checking for that)?