Chaser LED IC Help

[fiveten]

I built this circuit and I am having problems with it. Can I get some advise?
The problem I am having is that when I hook up power to the circuit the leds are chasing. I put a transistor at pin 4 on the 555 ic that turns on with harddrive activity. (I think hd act. is 5v.) I thought that if there is no power to pin 4 the the 555 will not have a high output. If I do not have power at the transistor base, the 555 output is not high and the 4017 should not activate the leds..... so why are they on all the time?

PS. I used someone elses diagram and made calcs for my leds and added a transistor to switch Vs to pin 4 on 555. The original diag. had a on/off switch at dc battery.

 

[jrz126]

Why exactly do you need the transistor? The pin wont draw alot of current so you can just directly connect it to the hard drive led wire.
and I think you would need a PNP transistor for this situation. I've already had BJT's in my microelectronics I class last semester, but they just focus on the theory behind it and not how to apply it.