Why does my hard drive icon appear at startup?

Answer by  Balaji (325)

It is due to some corruption in settings or change in icon list. Change settings. Or go to control panel and change the drive options

Answer by  fishy (1085)

The hard drive icon is more than normal during startup, it is indicating that the computer is searching for the system files for an operating system to start.

Answer by  asfg (13)

Usually the hard drive icon at startup means that you have something wrong with your drive. Simply use Windows disk error checking, a built in program to most versions of Windows to correct the matter.

Answer by  puckettgw (118)

Your hard drive either doesn't have enough free space (for good measure, this should be at least the size of your RAM plus 2 GB), or it is malfunctioning. The "chkdsk" tool (used from a command prompt) can locate and (usually) fix errors on your hard drive.

Answer by  Heffer (122)

There could be several reasons. The first could be that there is a portable hard drive connected to the compute via the USB and the computer is "seeing" it everytime it boots up. Another reason could be that the boot options are not in the correct order so the hard drive has to be searched for.

Answer by  John13 (186)

If you are working on a Macintosh computer, seeing a hard drive icon upon startup typically means that the startup drive cannot be found and the system is searching for an alternative drive to start up from.

Answer by  Vladlen (358)

Most likely it is because you have low disk space, but try reading what it says before rushing to delete files.