Friends:
I have a dell 4500, dual booting XP (40 G drive, C) and SUSE 9.1 (80 G drive, D). My problem:
After booting into SUSE, the HD that it is on will begin chattering, then about 30 seconds later, the other one will start in, going on another 30 - 60 seconds. THen it stops, and everything is ok. This does not happen in XP. The C drive is about 2 years old, and the D drive is less than a year, both bought new.
Any thoughts on why this is doing this and what I can do to stop it?
Thanks

If you notice simple hard drive activity when Suse starts up, that's totally normal, but if the drives are audibly making clicking or clattering noises, that to me is a worrisome sign. If you are not already making regular backups of your important data, now's the time to start. If those drives are still under the manufacturer's warranty, I'd consider exchanging them - based on your description, they could be headed for failure. Of course, you could simply ignore it, and the disks may continue to function just fine for many years to come, but as I said, noisy disks typically are a signal that they've got relatively serious problems. Sorry I can't offer any better advice. -- J.W.

Thanks for the reply.
I was think that as well. But neither one of the HDs exhibits such noisy chattering when in Windows XP. So I was wondering if maybe it was something in the LInux 2.6 kernel that made both HDs do that. Today, it did not happen, as seems to happen once in a while.

I'll just keep asking around.
Thanks

Hmm - well, there's nothing in the Linux kernel that would issue a command to the drives to rattle and make noise. It it turns out to be a one time thing then I'd agree that I'd write it off as an aberation, but if the behavior persists, at least for me it would be a bit of a concern -- J/W.

Go to the hard drives manufacturers website/e and download diagnostic utility/s. Run them to see if there is a problem. Even if no problem appears, I'd still be cautious over extraneous drive noises.

I noticed this on a Maxtor Diamond, 80GB, 7200 rpm that I bought earlier this year but never used until recently.

It's not a huge or loud noise, but I put it down to something I read in the Suse Admin manual along the lines that Linux tends to make more use of physical and swap memory than the CPUI (whereas Windows is more CPU instensive)

In my case, I have a 1200MHz Athlon XP CPU, 512MB of 133Mhz RAM and a 2GB Linux swap file. My dual boot with Win98 seems to work just fine and I just put the HDD 'chatter' down to Linux using the swap fle as additional RAM power.

The noise isn't constant, and this is just my experience.

Hi

I have a very near identical problem as the first chap. I am new to linux and installed SUSE9.1 obtained from a coverdic of a well know magazine.

I am dual booting XP (80 G drive, C maxtor) and SUSE 9.1 (200 G drive, D fujitsu). My problem:
After booting into SUSE, the HD that it is on will begin chattering.

The above does not happen in XP at all. The problem is it can't be healthy for the drives mechanics as it sound like the arm in the hdd is being swung violently back and forth.

I will try the drive diagnostics as HarryC has suggested. In the mean time if you guys can find the time to try and help look for a root cause I am sure both myself and undershepherd would be greatful, as I amm not feeling confident in booting to linux.

Thanks in advance

Surfa

Would any of the hdparm commands help? Like the -u, -U or -M switches:
#man hdparm
.........
-M
Get/set Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) setting. Most modern harddisk drives have the ability to speed down the head movements to reduce their noise output. The possible values are between 0 and 254.
128 is the most quiet (and therefore slowest) setting and 254 the fastest (and loudest). Some drives
have only two levels (quiet / fast), while others may have different levels between 128 and 254. THIS
FEATURE IS EXPERIMENTAL AND NOT WELL TESTED. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Couldn't settings like these affect such a hardware change?

Let me first say thanks so much for the replies and suggestions. I downloaded utilities for HDs to check, and both checked ok.
But I am convinced it is something to do with SUSE. The chattering does not happen in XP at all. It only happens in Linux, and for most days, it's within the first fifteen minutes after booting up. The HD that Linux is on begins to chatter, like it is doing a search, then after 30 seconds, the one on which XP is installed does it. It only does it this one time, no matter how long I have the computer on.I have tried exiting Linux while it is doing it, but that doesn't stop it. I did notice once that it seemed to happen only when I went online, but can't be sure of that. If I just let the computer sit after booting up, it also happens. I did not have this problem with SUSE 8.2 nor 9.0, only 9.1.
Thanks again for your help.

When the 'chattering' is occuring, hit 'ctrl' then 'esc' keys and look at the running processes. Which ones have high utilization? Try killing one at a time until the noise goes away. I know that if you specify noatime in your fstab that will reduce hard drive activity.

http://www.faqs.org/docs/securing/chap6sec73.html

Ok. tried that. Got a response in a terminal after a few seconds wait. Response was: "Do you wish to list all 4101 processes (y or n)? Quite a list. Is this what you expected?