my hard disk does occasionally load continuously without reason, maybe there is reason, but i have no idea. it only stop when i reboot the machine...
am i (my computer)hacked maliciously hacked by someboy or could something causing this.... because when i am in windows..the same situation aroses..

how can i know if my comp is hacked by someone..or can i spot the program accessing my HD...????

thanks

hkl8324

Hi.

It could be 'updatedb' running. This updates the locate database so you can find files using 'locate'. Next time your machine starts using the hard drive, check what is running with the 'top' command. Whichever program is causing the hard drive use will be at or near the top of the list.

It's probably 'updatedb' or 'prelink', and is nothing to worry about

Dave

you are right, but it is so annoying that the prelink and updatedb run every dat on my box...
what is the purpose of these two programs??? is it normal that my prelink takes my half an hour???because prelink render my box unuseable for that 0.5 hour..... and i scare my HD will die out soon because of this....

thanks again

Hi again.

prelink allows programs to start faster by 'pre-linking' shared libraries, so that this doesn't have to be done when a program starts up. You can switch this off if you like, it won't stop anything working. (I have prelink switched off, as it interferes with the win32 codecs in Xine)
On my system prelink takes about 7 or 8 minutes, so I suppose half an hour isn't outrageous.

updatedb goes through your directories adding each file it finds to a hash table so that files can be found very quickly by the 'locate' program. locate is a very useful utility, so I'd probably leave updatedb on. On the other hand, if you've never used locate and never intend to, you could switch off updatedb too.

If you want to switch off prelink, edit /etc/sysconfig/prelink and change PRELINKING=yes to PRELINKING=no.
If you want to switch off updatedb, remove /etc/cron.daily/slocate.cron

Both of these programs should run at a very low priority, and shouldn't interfere with you using your machine. I wouldn't worry about your hard drive dying - what tends to kill them is being swithed on and off all the time, not reading and writing to them.

Dave

understood...

but i am a last question about updatedb...will updatedb processes my windows partition if it is mounted as start up, how can i exclude this partition from updatedb....i think that is why updatedb need to take 0.5 hour to run...

the 3rd thanks

hkl8324

If you look in /etc/updatedb.conf you'll see a line which starts with PRUNEPATHS. Add whatever directories you don't want to be scanned in that list.

Dave