I've been running suse10.3 for awhile and no problems. Lately my hard drive seems to have a mind of it's own and I can hear it on and off quite a bit, even when nothing major running (nothing obvious in System Monitor under processes that doesn't look right).

I would like to find out what processes are accessing the hard drive. Is there a way to do that?

Thanks,

Tony

Use iotop. See http://guichaz.free.fr/iotop/

The drive maybe is about to fail. The noises could be retries.

ok, thanks. I'm backing up everything right now. I tried getting iotop but haven't been able to get it installed. Never installed anything python before and not sure if my system is 'python ready' ? Any quick help on that?
Thanks,

Tony

I installed python from suse repository, but still unable to get it running. Not much documentation found on website for iotop. Trying to install from rpm with Yast doesn't do much, yast runs, reads package then quits without saying anything. This is probably a 'newbie to python' issue on my side, but trying to back things up and k3b keeps erroring out, so need to get new dvd backup program and getting stressed....

iotop.py requires taskstats - which means a reasonably recent kernel (2.6.20 or later maybe), and the taskstats option selected. grep your kernel config for CONFIG_TASKSTATS.
IIRC, if you get it running, it will tell you if you don't meet the requirements.

Update:
Just checked the code - it does indeed check for Python >= 2.5 and taskstats active.

Most systems have vmstat and that will report how many reads & writes to the disks.

Just and update...I ordered a new hard drive --needed one anyway(who doesn't need another hard drive). Anyway, decided to give it one more try with the old one and installed suse 11 over the suse 10.3 on the old one. No issues! No abnormal sounds/noises. Running smooth. So started adding back in packages that I wanted/needed, this time actually writing down the changes and doing system backups along the way. Just today started making noise again. So got Iotop(thanks /usr/darien) and drive activity was from beagled which I guess is indexing in the background--so 'normal'. Last thing I installed was MPlayer and smplayer prior to noise, so will wait and see if noise occurs again and if so then restore backup to previous version and see if noise goes away.