re: external hard drive in use Friday, October 30, 2009 at 10:03 am Windows Vista Annoyances Discussion Forum Posted by MartinM (5127 messages posted) Presumably it is physically connected all the time ? Programs and processes can poll devices for all sorts of information at any time, and that can cause the HDD to spin up. Badly written applications do not always "let go" of the connection they've made, hence the HDD being "in use". If this doesn't happen in Safe Mode, you may have to go through the tedious process of eliminating your startup programs one by one to find the culprit :-( PS If you have mapped network drives it could be that Explorer is doing the polling, although I've not seen that myself. Written in response to: external hard drive in use (Jack Shaw: Friday, October 30, 2009 at 7:11 am) Responses to this message: re: external hard drive in use (Jack Shaw: Monday, November 2, 2009 at 9:06 am) All messages in this thread [show all] external hard drive in use (Jack Shaw: Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 7:11 am) re: external hard drive in use (MartinM: Fri, Oct 30, 2009, 10:03 am) re: external hard drive in use (Jack Shaw: Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 9:06 am) re: external hard drive in use (MartinM: Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 9:36 am) re: external hard drive in use (Jack Shaw: Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 10:19 am) re: external hard drive in use (MartinM: Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 10:31 am) re: external hard drive in use (Adam Bradley: Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 10:04 am) re: external hard drive in use (Jack Shaw: Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 10:22 am) re: external hard drive in use (Adam Bradley: Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 10:51 am) re: external hard drive in use (Jack Shaw: Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 12:07 pm) re: external hard drive in use (MartinM: Mon, Nov 2, 2009, 1:26 pm) Reply or follow-up to this message Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows Vista Discussion Forum