Weird HD Problems

riscphree · 03-27-2005, 01:41 AM

ok, i have a problem. while casually coding and listening to some music, my hard drive light comes on .. stays on. and my computer LAGS so bad i cant use it. it lasts until i do a hard reboot.

i have DMA enabled on my drive. what, oh what, can i do to fix this? do i need to post more info?

Thoreau · 03-27-2005, 03:43 AM

Either crond is kicking off a maintenance process and you're overreacting, or you have a bad hard drive sector that you're hitting and you're about to lose all of your data.

If you type "top" in command the next time the freeze happens, and you don't see any apps hitting it- just system calls- RMA your hard drive. You should back up your data now either way.

riscphree · 03-27-2005, 12:24 PM

there is nothing in my crontab

someone said it may be a memory leak somewhere, like something is using my ram and then eating up my swap

who knows, its weird

Thoreau · 03-27-2005, 04:42 PM

top would know. So use it when it begins to freeze again.

opjose · 03-27-2005, 09:10 PM

A bad hard drive sector COULD be to blame, but if you've enabled S.M.A.R.T. it would be fairly low in the probabilities.

It is more likely that this is an IRQ routing problem...

Do you have ACPI enabled on your system?

Have you checked the IRQ allocations?