hard drive never completely stops

[BobC]

It seems that my hard drive never really stops. When the computer is left idle for a period of time, the light flashes green sporadically. I mean that its not as active as when loading an application, but it is minimally active.

 

Its hard to be exact about this problem, but I didn't really notice it until my current installation of mandrake 10.1. I have two hard drives. The first hda, has a previous mandrake 10.1 installed which I damaged. I have mounted only the /home directory to get to my files. I reinstalled mandrake 10.1 on hdc. Its with hdc that I hear activity going on continuously. I am worrying about premature wearing out of this hard drive.

 

Thanks for your suggestions...

 

* processor Pentium III (Katmai) 500 MHz

* hda

Identification

Vendor: ‎Maxtor

Model: ‎6E030L0

Media class: ‎hd

Bus identification

Device ID: ‎0

Connection

Bus: ‎ide

Channel: ‎primary

Device

Old device file: ‎/dev/hda

New devfs device: ‎/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc

Partitions

Primary partitions: ‎1 (hda1)

Extended partitions: ‎7 (hda5, hda6, hda7, hda8, hda9, hda10, hda11)

Misc

Disk controller: ‎0

Geometry: ‎3972/240/63 (CHS)

 

* hdc

Identification

Vendor: ‎Western Digital Corp.

Model: ‎WD400BB-00AUA1

Media class: ‎hd

Bus identification

Device ID: ‎0

Connection

Bus: ‎ide

Channel: ‎secondary

Device

Old device file: ‎/dev/hdc

New devfs device: ‎/dev/ide/host0/bus1/target0/lun0/disc

Partitions

Primary partitions: ‎1 (hdc1)

Extended partitions: ‎7 (hdc5, hdc6, hdc7, hdc8, hdc9, hdc10, hdc11)

Misc

Geometry: ‎5169/240/63 (CHS)

Disk controller: ‎0

*

[daniewicz]

Do you have Windows installed as well? Your disk activity could indicate a virus.

 

How much RAM do you have? Too little RAM = too much swapping

[BobC]

Hi daniewicz,

 

I don't have windows installed any longer, although i did a couple of years ago.

 

Your mention of a virus reminds me of something else that happened recently. When mandrake 10.1 was first installed, it booted off the hard disk. After about a month, it would not boot any longer. I got around that by using an old boot diskette I had stored away. Each time I boot now, as GRUB starts up, I hit the E key, and type in the settings for my current installation. I had wondered if I have a boot virus, but have not been able to figure out how to tell.

 

I have 250 MB of RAM.

 

Thanks for your help.

[daniewicz]

I had wondered if I have a boot virus, but have not been able to figure out how to tell.

 

Is a reinstall with a complete hard drive reformat out of the question?

[BobC]

Is a reinstall with a complete hard drive reformat out of the question?

I know thats the best thing to.

 

However, because its a big job reinstalling the extra applications I have, I hesitate to do that.

 

I installed the clamav anti-virus utility, which is part of the mandrake 10.1 distribution. I am now trying to get that working, so that I can check for a boot virus.

 

Thanks again for your help

[pmpatrick]

Go to WD's website and download their hard drive diagnostics and check out that drive as well. The drive may be starting to go. If you get a lot of bad sectors and the drive is still under warranty, contact WD for a replacement.

[wilcal]

cron activity is normal

 

Folder:

/etc/cron.d

/etc/cron.hourly

/etc/cron.daily

/etc/cron.weekly

/etc/cron.monthly

 

all have script files in them that execute at a

specific time. I have created additional script

files in these folders to do regular house keeping

such as backup of specific directories. Once a

week on Sunday morning, 4:20AM, a script file

kicks off that takes about 15 minutes to complete.

The hard drive sounds like a washing machine.

And because my webserver is about a meter from

my feet when I am in bed there are times it

wakes me up.

 

Install and use webmin to understand, review and

modify your cron file schedule.

[alexpank]

My hard drive has done this to me ever since I put Mandrake 9.0 on. It'll do a small read/write (can't remember which) at intervals of a few seconds (always the same amount of time, but I can't remember exactly how much). I always just assumed this was something to do with the different way the filesystems work under Linux, but I could be wrong.

 

I've got two hard drives installed, hda with Mandriva and hdb with Win2k (NTFS), and hdb never does anything like this - most of the time it sits there doing nothing unless I check out something on that drive, which is rare these days.

 

I don't really have a solution, but it might be worth installing gkrellm or something like that so that you can see if the disk activity is regular, as mine is, or more random. And can anyone confirm or deny my theory that regular activity like this is simply a feature of the filesystem Linux uses?

[daniewicz]

And can anyone confirm or deny my theory that regular activity like this is simply a feature of the filesystem Linux uses?

 

Shrug.

 

I have never seen this behavior with 10.0, 10.1, or 10.2

[BobC]

My hard drive has done this to me ever since I put Mandrake 9.0 on.  It'll do a small read/write (can't remember which) at intervals of a few seconds (always the same amount of time, but I can't remember exactly how much).  I always just assumed this was something to do with the different way the filesystems work under Linux, but I could be wrong.

 

I've got two hard drives installed, hda with Mandriva and hdb with Win2k (NTFS), and hdb never does anything like this - most of the time it sits there doing nothing unless I check out something on that drive, which is rare these days.

 

I don't really have a solution, but it might be worth installing gkrellm or something like that so that you can see if the disk activity is regular, as mine is, or more random.  And can anyone confirm or deny my theory that regular activity like this is simply a feature of the filesystem Linux uses?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I installed Gkrellm as you suggested, and it shows that with my hdc there are constant writes taking place to the drive at about 2-3 second intervals. Like you, I also have two hard drives on my computer. My second drive, hda, does not show this continuous write activity either. I have a previous, now non-working, installation of mdk 10.1 on hda, with only the home directory mounted. This would suggest that the continuous write activity is not a characteristic of the linux file system, as you wondered. If it was, I guess the hda should have the same continuous activity.

 

I found a similar problem described by “machinemanagement” using Red Hat Fedora 4 at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/sh...d=1819860#post1. He found that his activity stopped when his dsl/network connection was removed. This was not the case for me. When I cut my dsl connection with the RP-PPPOE controller, or if I just pull out my modems USB cable, the write activity to hdc keeps happening.

 

A suggestion was made to run the “top” program which gives a listing of running tasks, to try to identify which program is writing to the hard drive. When I did that I see that X is usually on top of the list. I don't know how to tell if X is actually responsible for the hard drive activity.

 

A response to “machinemanagement” from “danimalz” was that “It's probably sync -ing your logs to disk.”. This sound quite plausible, given that it is a write taking place. I had a look a my syslog file by running “tail -F /var/log/syslog” in a terminal. I don't see messages coming in every 2-3 seconds, instead, there is a five minute interval since tht last message. I also checked the Xorg.0.log, the user.log, secure.log, the auth.log. But non show enteries coming in every 2-3 seconds.

[pmpatrick]

If you have your swap partition on hdc and not hda, I would suspect swap activity to account for the hdc disk activity. You could try experimenting by commenting out your hdc swap partition in fstab and creating a swap partition on hda and adding an entry for it fstab. i.e. isolate swap on hda. When running a heavy DE like kde or gnome, I think you will get swapping with 250MB of ram.

[BobC]

If you have your swap partition on hdc and not hda, I would suspect swap activity to account for the hdc disk activity. You could try experimenting by commenting out your hdc swap partition in fstab and creating a swap partition on hda and adding an entry for it fstab. i.e. isolate swap on hda. When running a heavy DE like kde or gnome, I think you will get swapping with 250MB of ram.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

I found that there were two swap files, one on hda and another on hdc. When I noted out the line in fstab for the swap on hdc, a lot of the activity on hdc stopped, as you suspected it would. Instead of each 2-3 seconds, the activity is now reduced to about each 10-15 seconds (when the dsl connection is off). Curiously, any idea why I don't see the "write to drive" activity shifting to hda , when the swap file is over there?

 

I noticed that Gkrellm can monitor each disk partition separately, so I can see which partitions are getting written to. The write activity each 10 to 15 seconds takes place on hdc9 which is setup as the /tmp directory.

 

I have hdc7 setup as my /var directory, and I can see additional activitiy on it when I turn on the dsl connection. I imagine that is caused by the logging activity of the Shorewall firewall I have running.

 

Thanks for your help, things are much improved now.