I have a CentOS 4.4 Server that has been running very solid until today. I was trying to script some image manipulation tasks and downloaded ImageMagick from their ftp site so I figured the download was OK being from ImageMagick.org but the install seemed to take a very long time and now my Server hard drives go nuts and stays so busy that I cant ssh in to do antything.

How can I see what is accessing my hard drive and shut it down?

I have looked at the output of ps -aux but I dont see anything in it that shows hard drive access times, it only shows processor times and the only services using high processor times are http and a few others that seem harmless. I tried to reboot but whatever is accessing the drives is in the startup routine so a reboot doesnt help.

I have tried to reboot with the nics unplugged to see if it is a phone home script sending info out or if it would stop running if Internet access is not available but it still runs.

Any help is appreciated.

Try as root:

# /sbin/fuser -vm <path to device file>

See also man fuser for more options.