My experience has been that when a hard drive runs too much for seemingly no reason, it is because S.M.A.R.T. Drive firmware is busy relocating bad sectors to prevent data loss. Scanning the drive may show no errors. Running the quick test of the manufacturer's testing software may well not detect errors either (SMART is good at masking failing drives) but if you run the long test it will probably show the drive as failing.

Acronis Drive Monitor software (free) will also show any problems. Before SMART, drives would just die if a lot of sectors went bad or the system would just hang - SMART is a great improvement but it can make one impervious to a soon to fail drive.

Hello thegarymontster, Thank you for Using Microsoft Answers Forum! Hard disk is a secondary Storage Media on the computer. Any application on process running on the. Jul 20, 2010 Hello thegarymontster, Thank you for Using Microsoft Answers Forum! Hard disk is a secondary Storage Media on the computer. Any application on process running on the. Hey everyone, recently my hard drive has been constantly running at 100% while I am just at the home screen. Task manager shows that 'system and compressed memory' is.

Windows 10 and Linux Mint are both excellent operating systems but have different file structures and when you install Linux it will most likely reformat your drive and any sector problems may disappear at least for a while. If the problem was not related to actual hardware fatigue the same could be accomplished by reformatting and then restoring or reinstalling Windows. Just wanted to post an update -- So I let the laptop takes its own course and finally after about 3 hours of spinning the machine is now back to normal. I am going try to find out looking into the logs the source of the issue.

I did not install or uninstall anything. I will post another update on my finding if any from the logs. However I did check the windows update screen and found this interesting message.

'We can't install some updates because other updates are in progress. Restarting your computer may help, and we'll keep trying to update.' So the system has given up on trying to install for now at least. I suspect once is restart the machine it will be trigger the spinning again. Keep you all posted. Since there is more than one possible cause, there is more than one possible solution.

Try the suggestion to just let it run for a while. Windows might be installing updates. If it's a desktop, turn it off, open it, and blow it out with canned air. If it is a laptop, make sure the exit vent is blowing out air. Turn the laptop off, and shoot a short blast into the exit vent. Install the free Wind Patrol program.

It has tabs to let you see your start-up programs. Don't disable anything that says 'Microsoft,' but you can carefully disable one program at a time to see what happens. Go to Task Manager--File--Run New Task.

Type powershell into the box that appears and check the box giving you Administrator Privileges, and then hit Enter. Swarplug 3. Give PowerShell several seconds to load, and type sfc /scannow into the command line. It will take about an hour or so to scan your hard drive for corrupt files.

(I don't think that's your problem, but it won't hurt).