XPS 630 HDD LED blinking all the time

What is the problem with the sound card.. my system will have the Sound Blaster X-fi Xreme gamer card... heard something about the X-Fi Screemer..??

 

Does the flashing red light acually mean the HDD is working hard...?? WOuld that make the HDD wear out faster ??

 

I just recieved my 630 machine, and I have the same flashing issue. Just a constant white blinking. This is out of the box - I haven't installed anything yet. I tried turning off the Autorun, and that seemed to calm it down, but I didn't leave it that way. There must be a better fix.

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@Yesdave wrote:
I just recieved my 630 machine, and I have the same flashing issue. Just a constant white blinking. This is out of the box - I haven't installed anything yet. I tried turning off the Autorun, and that seemed to calm it down, but I didn't leave it that way. There must be a better fix.

Message Edited by Yesdave on 06-28-2008 12:47 PM

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My understanding is that they are working on it. No ETA yet, though.

My system is due on the 2/7/08 (thats 2nd of July for our American friends)... Will post the results of any dramas that I have with my system.... hope all is well !!! :smileytongue:

i mean it still "heartbeats" so to say. but my old homebuilt did that too. i just learned to ignore it.

Granted, I've only been using Vista for a month or so, but this issue has been identified as a hardware problem (a resistor in the wrong location on the front control panel board) by Dell Engineering...and requiring a hardware fix (though they're apparently still trying to come up with a software solution).

 

Hello to all,

 

I recieved my system today (specs should be shown). I switched it on and after about 10 minutes.. I think it was setting my Mcfees the death blue screen came up and said it was shutting down the computer before any damage was done !!! After rebooting it seems to be good and stable (touch wood)

 

Anyway the fan starts up fairly loud and then after ashort time it drops down in speed... you really cannot even hear it at all...so there is no problem there....

 

The HDD light.... well the white light LED for the HDD flashs about every 2 seconds sometimes it flashs once and then after 2 secs it flashs again..... sometimes it does a quick 2 flash and then waits for 2 secs and then flash again.... no big deal really.... seeing the system is under my desk I dont really see it anyway. I have not changed any settings or changed colours etc... this is straight out of the box. All I hope it that the blue screen does not come back again.

 

Should I do anything else.... update drivers ??? There is a few drivers there under my service tag but I am the kinda guy that if its not broken why change it ....

 

Thanks

Dave

I´ve noticed two things:

 

My HDD light mostly blinks in two patterns:

-one time/second.

-Two quick blinks each second.

 

And while in the BIOS, Dell diagnosis etc the HDD light is mostly off but lits when accesing the HDD, as it should be. But the problem starts when starting Windows, in my case Vista.

 

Marcus

Well, that old adage or proverb, "...look for trouble and you'll find it..." seems to apply here. I recently purchased an XPS 630i around June 1st 2008 (at work and dont know the specs offhand aside from it running XP Pro with 4 GB Cor RAM and a Q6600 2.4 GHz Quad Core (not overclocked)).

 

There aren't any problems. I haven't tried to change the front lights, as I wasn't really interested in them, but there aren't any issues with the fans or hardware lockups or any BSOD. So far (knock on wood) I guess I've been fortunate. However, for some reason today, I decided to poke around and found this forum and this thread (I did do a little reasearch on the 630i before I made the purchase and remember there being an issue with the lights). Well, I must say I wasn't expecting all this.

 

During lunch I ran home really quick and found that my 630i has a "heartbeat" as well (the HD LED is blinking almost rhythmically). I plan to look more into it later using Diskmon and other tools. I do have the McAfee software still running on the system (factory install) so I may remove that just to test. I was tinkering with the nVida Control Panel when I first got the system but everything seems status quo so far aside from the LED. Another thing is the fact that the system was on only for 5 minutes when I went home for lunch so there could have been processes running in the background collecting updates (Windows updater and McAfee come to mind) causing the HD to be active. I'll post something if I notice the LED stop eventually after my system has been online and idle for a bit.

 

One thing I did notice before and wondered until I came to this forum was why the autorun function for my DVD drives was not working. I had been meaning to go into the registry to take a look at the setting but I'm not terribly big on the autorun to begin with, so it never was a huge question as to why it didnt work. I'm guessing now that Dell disabled my system's autorun in production...

 

Just a side thought, could the issues be stemming from the XP to Vista upgrade program Dell is offering on these systems? I simply have XP Pro (trying to avoid Vista like the plague as long as possible). Could the systems with the mix of both Windows OS be having the worst of issues? I mean, who's to say for sure what type of extra goodies Vista has stuffed into it that we don't know about yet?

Makengee, I had the same problem with the autorun feature not working. I spent about an hour with a Dell tech on the phone, and he couldn't figure out why it wasn't working.  After reading this forum, I learned that if you uninstall PowerDvd, auto run starts working, at least it worked for me.

 

As far as the blinking light goes, I was told by an XPS tech that it was normal. I have noticed that when the HD is working hard (like when you reboot) the light is on almost constant, but normally, it just flashes about once a second or so.

 

My wife has a Dell laptop with a light and I think it does the same thing. The light just isn't so bright and noticeable as on the 630I

Hi Chris_M...do we have any update on a fix for this issue?? I know you guys are working hard on this, but it's been a while now...

 

Thanks again. 

nicedaveus,

Nothing that can be released.

I open up Task Manager to see if anything was running in the back ground ( nothing was ) and noticed that the HDD light blinks at the same beat as the CPU and Page File usage history graph ticks. Not sure if this has anything to do with the problem or not. Just thought it was strange.

I don't think you need to uninstall PowerDVD.  It starts a program in startup (not the startup folder but in the registry) called PDVDDXSRV.exe.  I found if you kill this process in Task manager or more permanently in the startup tab of MSCONFIG you get back autorun.  I have found it also removed problems I had with burning software ImgBurn for DVD/CD writing.