Dustpuppy Posted September 26, 2006 Report Share Posted September 26, 2006 (edited) Desktop 2 has recently had a ram upgrade which means I can now run Gnome. However, about every two seconds the harddrive is accessed very briefly (enough to make a brief noise). Even when it's sitting there with nothing open it still does it :unsure: I wanna make it stop! Edited October 1, 2006 by Dustpuppy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted September 26, 2006 Report Share Posted September 26, 2006 Did this only occur after the ram upgrade? If so, take the ram out, does it go away? If not, the noise to me sounds like your hard disk is on it's way out. Or try KDE instead or whatever you were running before and see if it occurs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ilia_kr Posted September 26, 2006 Report Share Posted September 26, 2006 I'm not a pro, but could it be because gnome tries to access the swap partition? I would check that by disabling it... If it is an option at all Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dustpuppy Posted September 26, 2006 Author Report Share Posted September 26, 2006 It's doing it under icewm as well :sad: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted September 27, 2006 Report Share Posted September 27, 2006 Is the noise like clicking? If so, the heads are crashing into the disk, and will wreck the disk eventually. I'd get all your data off it, and get a new disk. Try reverting back to before the changes, and see if it stops, but I have a funny feeling it's hard disk failure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dustpuppy Posted September 27, 2006 Author Report Share Posted September 27, 2006 (edited) I'll have a go turning off swap and taking the ram out, but given that the hd is 6-and-a-half years old it's probably that. Gah. More money gone. ETA: yes, it's like it's clicking every couple of seconds. Edited September 27, 2006 by Dustpuppy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted September 27, 2006 Report Share Posted September 27, 2006 If this started after you installed gnome, then I would suspect gnome as the culprit. Gnome runs a daemon called "gam_server", aka "gamin" that polls the filesystem every couple of seconds for alterations. Gamin has been known to cause problems in the past on some setups, in particular, excessive cpu usage. It could just be something like that or may be completely normal under gnome. There may be other gnome specific services for monitoring the filesystem which may be causing periodic disk reads. I doubt turning swap off will help as the activity is problably a disk read rather than a disk write to swap. I also doubt that there is a problem with your hard drive unless you are experiencing other erratic systems. If you want to check the hard drive, download the diagnostic utilities from the hard drive manufacturer's website and run the diagnostics. That's usually the best way to tell. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dustpuppy Posted October 1, 2006 Author Report Share Posted October 1, 2006 New hard drive (finally), and no more noises. (There were other signs of harddrive failure - odd lockups and difficulty installing the OS). Thanks for the help! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted October 1, 2006 Report Share Posted October 1, 2006 Glad you got it sorted. Hope you didn't lose any data :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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