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hard drive activity


Guest ztevyn
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Guest ztevyn

I just installed mandriva 2008.1, and every 3-5 seconds the hard drive light flashes. It does not happen when I use it on battery. I do not have beagle installed. Is there anyway I can fix this?

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If you have installed from the Live CD then you could well have the slideshow running for the background. Unless you have changed your background of course. You could run top in a shell and see if anything pops up at the correct interval. Aprt from that I'm probably talking rubbish. :D

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I think you are worrying about nothing.

The Hard drive activity light only gives an extremely short blink.

 

I've seen it on my Mandrivas for at least 4 versions and I suspect even before that.

 

As far as I can tell it is perfectly normal. If the flashin duration is longer than just a blip then that is a different matter, obviously some application is activating the Hard drive.

If you haven't got an application open the something is working in the background and you need to be aware of it and close it if you want yo.

 

Suggestion : Just because you see something the first time and don't understand it, do NOT assume that there must be something wrong with your Mandriva even when everything seems to be working OK.

 

Cheers. John.

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  • 1 month later...
Guest Vince

Hi,

 

I see exactly the same thing (but the hard drive is noisy)...

With Mandriva 2006 I've never seen something like that. It seems that the issue comes with Mandriva 2008.1...

 

I have two hard drives but I don't know wich one makes noise.

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If the hard disk is noisy, I would say this is a hardware problem - rather than a Mandriva problem - unless of course, you have booted Windows or something else, and that you don't get the noise.

 

To decide which one is making noise, you will have to disconnect the power from one of the disks to see if the noise continues for the second disk still connected.

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I have had that 5 second interval single impulse in 2007.1, 2008-Free and 2008-Spring.

I have different hard drives installed in the past month and it still occurs so it has nothing to do with the hard drives.

It also occurs on my various friends Mandriva machines and also on my second box. That is why I said in my post previous that it appears to be a normal event since it is so widespread.

 

A noisy HDD is a symptom of a real problem ahead such as an impending Disc failure. Back up your data to an alternative source as quickly as possible.

 

However I am curious to learn what causes it so as to add to my Linux/Mandriva knowledge. Does anyone know, perhaps AdamW ???. :D

 

Cheers. John.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Quick comment, though I'm clearly late to the party....

 

 

Linux (as in the kernel) does a sync every 5 or 6 seconds.

This is normal and smart, meaning in a power outage (including your kid pulling the plug or whatnot), you'll never lose more than 5 secs of data.

 

On the other hand, my disks show 80-140MB/s continuous reads, which is what I'll open another topic about shortly...

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