I hope that there is help for this. Long story short, i had an 32 bit intel board and processor, 2.8 Ghz, 2 gig of ram. Running opensuse 10.3 32 bit, and was loving every minute of it. Then tragedy struck, my mother board took a dumper on me. So needless to say, i purchased a new AMD 64 bit board and 2.4 Ghz processor, a new 2 gig of memory (same hard drives). Re-installed everything from scratch.

Dual booting, as before: XP first, linux second (this time i used 64 bit). Well everything went fine until i noticed that my system seemed to be running slower than before when running linux. Strange, then i noticed that my hard disk LED was on all the time, not so under XP. Interesting, so i thought 'well maybe its something ammiss about the 64 bit opensuse 10.3', so i started all over again, this time with the 32 bit 10.3.

Well, i noticed that it does the same thing!?! So, I pondered for awhile about this, tried several things checked system logs, ran TOP, LSOF, checked the swap drive, all seemed normal! Frustrating, so I thought lets give it one more go...

This time when i inserted the 10.3 installation DVD, i noticed that the hard disk LED was on constantly, and I had not even installed the OS yet. So even more curious, I went through with the install and rebooted to both OS's. XP, fine. Linux, hard disk running constantly.

Last resort, I booted with 'splash=verbose' at grub menu and watched to see at what point this occurred. Well of course it scrolls by so damn fast that i can't get quite accurate enough information. BUT, i did notice that it happens somewhere between 2 lines, either:

ACPI something or another boot

OR

SATA something or another boot

Im not sure if this is something to do with ACPI of this mother board or the SATA settings.

If anyone else has had experiences with this PLEASE help. It would not bother me except for the fact that i dont want my hard disk burning out, and it really sucks that my linux system is running so slow. And it REALLY sucks having to fall back on XP!

Any info that is needed please let me know and i will provide if i can.

Motherboard:=A770M-A
Processor:=AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4200+
Hard Disk:=WD 250 Gig SATA
OS's:=Windows XP 64 bit, openSUSE 10.3 64 bit

Use the top program and check if a program is using a lot of resources. Being a fresh installation, I think that the beagle service is indexing the contents of your files. If this is the case, then this could be a temporary situation. However, look in your logs such as /var/log/messages and see if there are any hard drive related messages. Check that your cables are snug. I hope that your drive isn't going belly up.

One kernel boot option to try is "noapic".

Hello, yes i have tried the top program, as well as lsof, and others, nothing seems to think that the hard drive is running. It is not some eroneous program running (such as beagle helper updating), it is just bizzare. And no i dont believe that the hard drive is failing, due to the fact that i have tried different drives and it reacts the same. And this is what i am trying to avoid is the hard drive failing due to over usage.

Ok, found out something interesting, just tried installing an old opensuse 10.2 and i did NOT run into the same problems.

Ok, well discovered something new. The driver that loads and keeps the drive spinning for eternity is the ahci driver. I looked up the definition on the internet, but i am not that savvy to understand whether or not that i need it. If not is there a way to disable it? Any help would be great.......

Come on, does no one have any ideas?

There is article on Wikipidia about ahci and AMD and the possible problems
and solution depending of the chip set on you,re mobo

Hope it will help you

all the best