irritating, repetitive HD sound (only in Linux)
 

Hi,

Would anybody happen to have any insights into the following?

I have a very standard Dell Dimension 4100 running a very standard dual-boot Win98SE/Red Hat 6.2 setup.

Everything works completely fine, except that I have noticed a very irritating thing whenever I am running Linux.

For some reason, only when I am running Linux, my hard drive seems to make a very brief (fraction of a second) read/write action about every five seconds or so, even when my machine is doing virtually nothing.

Does anybody know why this might be?

I have 128MB of RAM (with room to spare), and plenty of swap space allocated, I believe, so I can't understand why I should hear such very brief hard drive accesses every few seconds.

Any ideas on this? I suspect that whatever is going on here has a very simple cause/solution. But what?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

This incessant, and seemingly very needless, "zip... <pause> zip... <pause> zip... <pause>" sound of my hard drive is beginning to drive me crazy.

Thanks,
Ben

Btw: I feel quite sure there is nothing wrong with my hard drive itself. : )

Re: irritating, repetitive HD sound (only in Linux)
 

I knew the answer to this one once, but I've slept since then...

But IIRC, it had something to do with cron. I think. Maybe...


No, other than annoying you (and of course, the unnecessary wear on the drive), it shouldn't hurt anything.

I kinda remember how we isolated the problem, it was by killing processes in kpm until the drive shutup (hmm, try umounting it and see who complains?)


John

Have a look at the time stamps in your system logs. Sounds like something is generating a tidbit of information that needs to be noted. Have a look at /var/log/messages, /var/log/warn. Use to see the last 100 lines or to watch the last lines of the logs as written live.

I think I found the solution to my problem
 

Hey guys, thanks very much for your suggestions. Those were exactly the sorts of things I was looking for.

Here's what I've found (I'll try to keep this brief):
1. Nothing seemed wrong with any of my /var/log files.
2. Nothing seemed wrong with any of my cron activity.
3. I performed a very exhaustive search of newsgroup postings and came across the following message, which seemed to describe my situation exactly.

-------------------------------

From: suntong001@my-deja.com (suntong001@my-deja.com)
Subject: Redhat: hard drive accessing
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Date: 2000/09/30


Hi,

I found that my Redhat6.2 tries to access my hard drive about every 5 seconds. I'm using a 256M RAM P3 with 1G swap, So I am really curious why redhat access my HD so often.

I didn't seem to notice this on my debian, maybe I'm wrong...

Please provide your comments, tips or tools, etc on this, thanks!

* Tong *
-------------------------------

To make a long story short, a respondent suggested the cause of this problem is likely a Gnome process called magicdev.

I had already listed all of my processes running and, using the process of elimination, had begun killing daemons I thought most likely to be the cause of my problem.

Sure enough, once I then killed magicdev, the vast majority of my incessant hard drive access noises ceased.

So, for whatever reason, magicdev seems to be the cause of this particular problem.

It just so happens I'm going to be upgrading to Red Hat 7.2 this week. So, fortunately, I think that will permanently solve this magicdev issue as well while I'm at it.

Guys, thanks again for your help with this issue. I learned a lot in the process!

Thanks again,
Ben

Magicdev is an automounter for floppies and cds, and it polls the system every few seconds to see if a disk has been inserted. That's the reason for the noise.

I found that my hard drive was being hammered by `updatedb` which is run from within '/etc/cron.daily'. This updates a db which is used by `locate`(similar to `find`?).