Dear Guru's
...about 6 months ago, I took the plunge and, after fitting GRUB, changed to dual boot Debian (Sarge)/linux with KDE desktop and my old windows98 as legacy.
On the whole, very happy with debian, which I use for 95% of the time.
But there is one difference: with Linux, I get a fair amount of clunky noise, coming, I guess, from the HD, which seems almost totally absent on windows. It sounds like noisy disk access. although I could be wrong.

It's scarcely bothering, but one does wonder what is going on.
Any suggestions?

Hmmm....

I had the same problem with windows many years ago. I didn't really know what to do, so the first thing that came to my mind was to remove the hdd and take a closer look at it. That inspection didn't really give any result, at least I couldn't see anything wrong. So I fitted the harddisc back into my computer, reconnected it and tightened the screws.

The funny thing was that the next time I booted it, the noise was totally gone. And that is really odd, 'cause I can't see how position of the hdd (or the screws or anything) can have impact on noise coming from the device. Anyway, that did the trick for me. May be you should give it a try?..

Though, again, it's strange that OS should have anything to say....

as root you could run

ps aux | more

or even just

ps

to find out what processes are running, maybe one of them is very disk intensive? How much RAM do you have? How much swap space? (should only be a problem if you run any sort of GUI)

I had the same problem under Ubuntu 5.04 with a 4GB HDD. Moving to a larger (200 GB) HDD solved the 'clunk' issue for me.