Every day at some point, i switch from one application to another (under gnome) and the hard drive just never stops clicking! The only solution is to perform a hard reset the machine..

I've tried opening a terminal (which takes about ten minutes) and typing in "top" (another five minutes), to see what process is running.. It always seems to be kswapd0 at the top of the list, mocking me, using none of the CPU (about 1%)..

I take it this problem just means that the pages on the disk are just thrashing about, rather than achieving anything useful.. Is this a common problem? Any idea on how to stop it happening??

I'm running debian unstable, on a P3 1ghz with 256 meg of ram.. (not ideal, i know, but it should run ok)..

James

Did you say "clicking"? Sounds like a failing hard drive to me. I run Linux on much slower machines without those types of problems, so its not your actual machine specs.

Sorry, I didn't mean just clicking.. I meant accessing, lights flashing etc..

James

I've just noticed that i don't actually have a swap partition.. Is this likely to be part of the problem?

James