HD LED permanently lit

ColonelPanic · 06-15-2006, 09:12 AM

My hard drive seems to be permanently running, at least from what the LED shows. It never flashes but it's permanently lit. I know it's not a hardware issue since it's fine in 'MS Gates'.

any thoughts?

much appreciated

tizzef · 06-15-2006, 10:19 AM

What type of HD do use ??

ColonelPanic · 06-15-2006, 02:35 PM

hi there.
this is weird. I have my config in the signature but I can't see it anymore. What happened to the signatures?

Electro · 06-15-2006, 10:31 PM

Upgrade the BIOS. I have seen more ASUS motherboards do this than other brands. If that does not work, give a good whack to the computer case. It should knock the heads in place. However, it may be a good time to find a replacement hard drive.

ColonelPanic · 06-16-2006, 06:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Electro

Upgrade the BIOS. I have seen more ASUS motherboards do this than other brands.

As I said, the HD is behaving normally in Windoze.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Electro

If that does not work, give a good whack to the computer case. It should knock the heads in place. However, it may be a good time to find a replacement hard drive.

Now that hint is exactly what I needed. Thanks a lot...
**************************************************************

Anyway back to the question: could it have something to do with a process which is permanently running off the HD and not resident in the RAM? Is there a way to figure out which processes are loaded into the memory and which are running off the HD?

cheers

J.W. · 06-16-2006, 06:39 PM

It could simply be that the hard drive LED is (incorrectly) connected to a different pin, such as the one for power.

ColonelPanic · 06-17-2006, 02:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by J.W.

It could simply be that the hard drive LED is (incorrectly) connected to a different pin, such as the one for power.

cheers for the reply.
Does that mean Linux reads the pin connections on the mobo in a different way than Windows?

J.W. · 06-17-2006, 11:37 AM

No, the functions of the mobo's pins are controlled by the mobo's wiring/circuitry, not the OS.

I once had a similar problem, where the hard drive LED was on all the time but the power LED was always off, and the cause was simply that I had not connected the appropriate wire to the correct pin, hence my earlier post.

Crito · 06-17-2006, 12:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ColonelPanic

I know it's not a hardware issue since it's fine in 'MS Gates'.

any thoughts?

I don't think you can deduce any such thing from the available evidence. In fact, I bet it probably is hardware related. There's probably something buggy about the controller that the Windows driver has been patched to fix but for which the generic Linux driver has no idea. Sometimes the hardware manufacturers do this themselves and the problem even shows up installing an off-the-shelf/retail copy of Windows.

ColonelPanic · 06-19-2006, 03:05 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crito

I don't think you can deduce any such thing from the available evidence. In fact, I bet it probably is hardware related. There's probably something buggy about the controller that the Windows driver has been patched to fix but for which the generic Linux driver has no idea. Sometimes the hardware manufacturers do this themselves and the problem even shows up installing an off-the-shelf/retail copy of Windows.

After double-checking I see that the LED is flashing correctly also at post and during boot. It only goes into permanent lit once Linux is up. Hence my reluctancy to believe this is a hardware issue.

Although it doesn't seem to be a problem, I am still curious what the reason could be.

Electro · 06-19-2006, 03:57 AM

Probably cron is running updatedb which updates the locate datebase file. Use ps or top to check if this is true.

ColonelPanic · 07-03-2006, 09:11 AM

For those interested, I just made a test install with kernel 2.6.17 and the LED issue is gone. It behaves normally as opposed to 2.6.12.

Any thoughts?

sporkinum · 07-03-2006, 02:08 PM

If you are running KDE and KDE is running kat, and you have alot of stuff on your HD, it will do that. Kat indexes files for fast searching and does it all the time. You can right click on the kat icon on your toolbar and either turn it off, or change what directories it indexes. In my case, it was indexing all the crap I have on my windows partitions, and would run forever. I configured cat to only index /home in linux and the problem went away.