See what program is accessing hard drive

Windows will automatically recognize the drive after a few seconds. Double-click the hard drive's letter from the right pane's Hard Disk Drives section to view the drive's contents.

To view files within folders, double-click the folder. Click "OK. If a hard disk contains no partition and all disk space is unallocated, it will not show in Windows Explorer. If a new hard drive cannot be detected by the system BIOS, the cause might be that the disk is not enabled. He mainly writes articles about data recovery tutorials on PC and Mac and how-to tips for partition management. He always keeps an eye on new releases and likes various electronic products.

Author Jean has been writing tech articles since she was graduated from university. She has been part of the EaseUS team for over 5 years. Her special focuses are data recovery, disk partitioning, data space optimization, data backup and Mac OS.

By the way, she's an aviation fan! It's far from perfect, partly because today's advanced disk technology makes data-recovery more difficult than it was with the simpler technology of the past. It comes with a selection of advanced features, including partition recovery, formatted drive restoration, and corrupted file repair.

Screen Recorder. Transfer Products. File Management. More Products. Full steps Fix 2. Put in a Freezer If it's the hard drive problem that disables the boot, try putting it in a freezer Full steps Fix 3. Full steps Fix 4. There are two methods and tools that you can use to identify the process. Once you have identified the bad process, you can kill it in Task Manager.

Method 1 Click on the Start Button and key in perfmon. On the overview screen click on the Disk section down arrow to see a list of all processes and the files they are writing or reading from your drives. Click on the Read, Write or Total headings to sort all disk operations to identify which process and file is currently using the disk the most.

You will now see the new columns listed for each process. Checking what processes are constantly and actively accessing your hard drive is important to detect suspicious or unnecessary activity. Besides hard disk access, the program will also show what is using up CPU cycles, give information about the process itself and even offers the option of sending the file to VirusTotal or running a scan with Kaspersky Security Scan.

After installation or extract the executable with 7-Zip to get a portable version , run the program and it will automatically start monitoring your system and display the processes that currently have hard disk or CPU activity.

Use the Freeze tick box to pause the list if the window is updating too quickly for you. Clicking on the process in the list will pull information about the process from the internet such as details, security, known problems, external links and etc. System monitoring will give you information about disk usage and file system activity in addition to many other things, and probably the number one tool for this job is Process Monitor by Microsoft owned Sysinternals.

For such an advanced tool Process Monitor is reasonably easy to use and it starts monitoring the system as soon as you start the program. The filtering system is probably one of the most important areas to get to know otherwise you will always be overloaded with information. This window will show information about reads, writes, events, file access times and the path to the files causing the activity. The By Folder tab is useful for tracing if file reads or writes are coming from non standard locations such as the Temp or Users folders or even other drives.

Download Process Monitor. A similar tool by SysInternals called DiskMon is also available although it dates back to It can log and display all hard disk activity on a Windows system but only tells you which sector is being read or written and not the process that is causing the activity.

This makes it difficult to tell which file or program is accessing your hard drive using DiskMon by itself. As you might expect, a good task manager is able to display which open process is accessing the hard drive and by how much in addition to CPU and memory usage etc. There are many such tools around that can do this, including Process Explorer, Process Hacker, System Explorer, and others.

While installing Anvir free be careful to avoid the adware during install, or preferably use the portable version. Run the Anvir. The read and write load on the disk in Kilobytes per second is already shown in its own column and displayed with a yellow background which becomes brighter the higher the activity.

Click on the column header to sort by the most or least active. Obviously being a task manager you have the options to manipulate and get more information on the running processes causing high disk usage.

If you want extra detail like separate reads and writes from something like Process Explorer , you need to manually add the columns to the display. Something many users tend to overlook is Windows often has what you need right there built into the operating system, sadly most of the tools are hidden away or are not well documented and therefore remain relatively unknown.