Laptop lid closed. Accessing hard drive light flashing

[anon125]

It is set to sleep when the lid is closed

Is it having nightmares? 

Seriously what action is needed

Thanks

Ps it is left plugged in.

[WAWood]

@anon125 

Does it do this right after you close the lid?  Asking because new laptops come with something called Fast Startup automatically enabled and that requires files to be saved when the lid is closed -- so it might be doing that.

Win10 has enabled a new hibernation process known as Fast Startup -- which is enabled BY DEFAULT. This is different from Fast Boot, which is a BIOS/UEFI option.

Fast Startup is supposed to dramatically speed up the booting process, but in some PCs, it actually slows it down or causes it to hang. It's also a new form of hibernation known as hybrid sleep -- and this causes battery drain to maintain the state of the PC while turned off. In some rare cases, it can also cause a laptop to overheat because the processor is still running and still generating heat, as this has been reported when the laptop was turned off and put inside a case.

Disabling Fast Startup might fix booting and shutdown problems.

There are two ways to disable FastStartup in Win10: (1) through the Control Panel, and (2) through an elevated command prompt.

Control Panel - Open Control Panel --> Power Options.
Select "Choose what the power buttons do"
Select "Change settings that are currently unavailable"
At the bottom of the Window, under Shutdown settings, uncheck the box regarding fast startup

Elevated command prompt - run the following command:
REG ADD "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Power" /V HiberbootEnabled /T REG_dWORD /D 0 /F

In both cases, reboot Windows.

NOW, Fast Startup is disabled.

See if that helps.

[anon125]

The light flashes 24/7

Thanks for your help

[WAWood]

@anon125 

If the laptop is not hibernating or sleeping, I can see no reason why the drive light would continue to be flashing.

Someone else here, a while back, claimed their laptop had been "hacked" because they hooked a networking monitor up to it and determined that even when the laptop was shut down, it was still sending packets OUT.  I said I did not see how that was possible, but they claimed it was and now, it seems like you might have the same issue.

[anon125]

This laptop has never been connected to internet or anything else.

Thanks for your help