Hi !

My HDD led is on 1 time per second, but i use nothing. No transfert, no app launched (only X).

I disabled rc.syslog and rc.hald, but they aren't faulty.
Top isn't very useful.

Using telinit 1 stops those accesses.

Any idea ?

Wonder if the machine is using swap space?

Brian

Yes, when you are in single user mode, you've disabled most of the daemons that would be writing log messages and other information to the drive periodically.

You could try manually shutting down daemons one at a time until the disk access stops. You could also use lsof to see what processes are accessing the hard disk.

I disabled all i could in rc.d, but i always see that hdd led light every second !!!
I didn't started X.
I tried lsof, but there's too much info for me. Maybe you have some tips about it ?
At least, gkrellm told me that it's sda (where i have / and /home) which is accessed. Both sda1 and sda2 are simultaneously accessed with writings only (orange krellms).

You could try filtering the output by specifying a directory hierarchy. For example, to display open files under /home you could use:
I don't recommend that for the root directory "/" - it may be worth checking /tmp and /var though.

You could always put a piece of tape over the light...

People use to do that with low oil indicator lights on cars.

Well i can't isolate the faulty process !
I think i need some kind of real-time viewer, some kinda tail. lsof gives me too much output and those accesses may be anywhere on fs.

If it's a log file then maybe

might help? Have you tried turning off syslogd?

I second the request to see if the machine is using swap space, which hasn't been really clarified.

If that's not the case, another alternative is to use the inotify tools (package recently added to slackware-current but I suppose there's no problem in compiling it yourself). With "inotifywatch" you can recursively monitor a directory hierarchy during a period of time. So you can monitor, let's say, /var, or /usr, or /tmp or whatever for 3 seconds and see which files are being accessed or modified. It will not tell you the process directly, but by letting you see which actual files are being touched, you can guess which process is accessing the hard drive because you'll have more information to filter the output of "lsof", or simply by file name you could guess the process.

I disabled logs.
I disabled almost all services.
Swap used is 0 k.

Ok for inotify. I'll try it.
Thanks and stay tuned.

I'm at work, but I run gkrellm on my home computer. gkrellm updates about once a second and one of the things it checks is drive space. Have you quit out of gkrellm? Also is gkrellmd running? And do you have smartd installed and running?

-JJ

And you could also try 'swapoff' just to be double sure.

I seem to remember gkrellm used to show activity on one of my old hard drives. but that stopped when I got myself a new big one. I never did find out what it was though.

I will go with you using a journaled file system like ext3, reiserfs ... those write to the journal all the time, if using ext3 you could test this by simply changing to ext2 in your /etc/fstab and rebooting then see if you still have the access to the drive going on.

I've been running gkrellm for quite a while and although it updates the info often, it never writes to the HDD (AFAIK) on a regular basis ... only very rarely (like when saving the config file). As for journaled filesystems, it is possible, but I have JFS and if I'm not doing anything, there are 0 (zero) writes to the HDD.

I'm betting it's some daemon that's logging a lot of things. Have you tried starting or switching to single user mode ?