hi all,

during the last few days, hard disk in my laptop is "doing something" (reading or writing, no idea, but it just gets busy and hd-led is on all time long) from time to time ... mouse and keyboard are not reacting during this periode, but X does not crash ... gkrellm is running at this time, and it does not show anything about writing/reading, but hard disk led is on ... this happens from time to time (mostly after waking up from standby, but sometimes also during normal work) and it is going on for a few minutes ... after that, everything is ok again and I can continue with my work.

is there a tool for monitoring hard disk, which I could run in the background, to find out, what is going on ... I think my hard disk is dying, but I would like to be sure and if it is dying, I would like to "kill" it somehow in the next few weeks, because I have the guarantee until october.

kernel update etc. didn't help. no messages in syslog or messages. everything looks normal, but my disk has a fit from time to time and I have no idea why.

any ideas? thanks.

M.

Usually when this happens it is because updatedb is updating your slocate database.

If you run "top" it should show that updatedb is running. even if it isn't, top should give you an idea of which application is using the most cpu and likely usign the most disk.

no, it's not updatedb ...

I thought about it, and even turned it off in the cron ...

and "top" shows nothing special when this problem occurs ... cpu is on 0-1%, no disk writing/reading according to gkrellm etc ...

M.

Do you have a swap file that is being used a lot?
free -m

What is your swap level set at?
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness