I recently installed Redhat 8.0 on a dedicated box. When I boot off the HD, the o/s loads, but the HD runs non-stop. I even left it overnight and it didn't stop. During this the machine is very very very sluggish -- it takes about a minute to see a response from every mouse click. Very annoying.

However, if I boot from a floppy everything is just fine.

I have tried both lilo and grub, gnome and kde. Re-installed numerous times. No difference.

What's going on? What do I need to tweak so I can boot normally from the HD? Please point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance.

Boot your box and run top. Check if there is anything running when booting with HD that is not when you boot with the floppy.

Hmmm. Tried running top. Exactly the same processes are running when I boot from a floppy compared to the HD.

Maybe this is a clue. X runs generally at about 1-4 %CPU. However, after booting from the HD it occasionally jumps briefly up to 95% or higher, then drops back to the 1-4% range. This does not happen when I boot from the floppy. Does this spark any other ideas?

I'm grasping here, but is it possible there is some process that does maybe a HD scan or something else after first boot and I just haven't given it enough time to finish? However, I'd see such a process when I run top, right?

What I don't get is why something doesn't jump out as continuously chewing up CPU time (other than X occasionally).

Here's some of my hardware info:

1.3 GHz Celeron, 80GB HD, 512MB PC133 RAM, MSI MS-6368 mobo.