symptom: read access to my home directory has dropped to internet access speeds (VERY slow, i'm not networked). also, about every four or five times i boot the machine, the start up hangs at "mounting local filesystems". when i reboot, it complains the disks were not cleanly unmounted, checks them all (i have 3, all except one is working properly). when it checks my hdb1, it takes 1 and a half hours! it finds it to be fine and boots successfully. the other two disks check out at normal speeds...a few seconds.

my stats: mandrake 9.1, p4 1.5gz, 512 RAM, 3 hard drives all 7200 rpm, ide, 40 gb.

my fstab (hdb1 is the problem):
/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hdb1 /home ext2 nosuid,defaults 1 2
/dev/hda5 /mnt/backup ext3 rw,suid,dev,auto,user,async 1 2
/dev/scd0 /mnt/cdrecorder auto rw,noauto,user,exec 0 0
/dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom auto ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0
none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=auto,--,iocharset=iso8859-1,sync,codepage=850,umask=0 0 0
/dev/hdc5 /mnt/openspace ext2 rw,suid,nodev,noexec,auto,user,async 1 2
none /proc proc defaults 0 0


oh please oh please any ideas out there? grinning but desperate.

thanks!

Are you getting any errors in /var/log/messages

Would your dma access be turned off? Open an x terminal and give these commands:

there are no error messages in my log messages file.

dma is turned on. hdparm returns:

/dev/hdb:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 0 (off)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 8 (on)
geometry = 3736/255/63, sectors = 60030432, start = 0