How do I know if this is a VIRUS?

[LeoNDiego]

I have over time purchased/built three different machines. PPro200, p2-450 and now a P3-850 oc'd to 901...

I added a second drive to the PPro200 a while back. shortly afterwards it began accessing the drives at all times, even to the point of affecting performance. The second (p2-450) did not do this until I networked it to the Pro, then they both started. you can watch the drive lights flicker. (the p2-450 has only ONE 8gig HD). Recently I built the p3-850, it has two HD's a 20 gig and a 46 gig. it was very quiet and it's performace was astounding. after a few weeks I networked it into the other two. Only a day afterwards I get the same constant drive accessing you can see the drive light flickering and hear the drive being accessed. Once again this is affecting drive performance. I have loaded three virus programs in an attempt to find the virus (Norton, MacAfee, and AVP) NONE of these has located a virus. Has anyone heard of anything like this at all? any help would be greatly appreciated as I am on the verge of formatting all five drives and dumping nearly 75 gigs of information (mostly programming and DB development stuff.)

PLEASE HELP!

Thanks in advance. =)

[OuTpaTienT]

What if you take one machine off line, reformat and reinstall fresh the os. Make sure it's not getting the constant HD access. Prepare it to be networked but don't connect it yet. Then take a "snapshot" of the system. I believe there are programs that'll record the current state of the file system. Then connect it to the network and see what changes.

If on the slim chance you have a virus no one knows about, you'd be doing us all a favor by isolating it and informing one of the anti-virus companies.

Just a thought.

[socalgal]

I'm sorry I can't tell you what the problem is, but if there is a possibility someone is using a trojan to control your drive/s, you can download a trial of The Cleaner (http://www.moosoft.com/download.php) and make fairly sure this is not (or is) the case.

I'm sure you'll get more suggestions. Best wishes.

[steves1728]

Hmm....Could be but I'd rather not suspect a virus here-just yet.Have you run any software to monitor threads? Worth the look is this one. Mange all running processes-freeware-6 ducks at nonags-homepage here: http://atm.idic.caos.it/higheng.html

[LeoNDiego]

Downloaded the programs...

There were no Trojans detected, and I have a lot of programs running none of them seems extrodinary. I killed them al one by one avoiding the windows threads till last and it never stopped...

The drives are UDMA 100 drives, I selected the 'DMA' setting on the device profiles in windows even though that was not set originally.

[steves1728]

why dont we benchmark the drives..Would be interesting to ascertain the exact degree of performance degradation....Could be an overlay software calling on the drive?...46 gb is big.Did ATM pickup a thread there? Could be in the networking...are the cards ok? no conflicts? Mobo,bios version might tip someone off...