Hard drive won't shut down

[Lofty]

I have recently upgraded my PC to XP Pro from 98SE. Before my hard drive was set to shut down after 30 mins of inactivity which it did with out fail. Now it won't shut down at all. I think I have all the power saving settings set correctly, and I can't see any activity of the drive. What can be causing this?

[sft42]

I had the same problem for a while lofty which still re-occurs occasionally. I can only recommend going to the microsoft update site and making sure you have all they most recent upgrades then makeing sure you have nothing running when you attempt to shut down especially p2p software which constantly looks for internet connections and tends to muck about with shut down. failing this try the microsoft trobleshoot online pages which are very good but i've heard that you may have lots of problems after an upgrade you should try for an clean install of XP if at all possible.

[Lofty]

Thanks for the reply sft42. Judging by you answer, I don't think I explained the problem correctly. It's not a complete shut down of the machine i am having trouble with, its that I want the hard drive to pover down when I leave the machine un attended. The PC has to run all the time as it answers the fax line, and I want the hard drive to shut down, but the machine to keep running. Also, my upgrade to XP Pro was a 100% clean install after fdisk and format of C drive.

[moonacre]

Could be that you need to make some changes to your PC Bios to allow the APCI to work properly.