HDD Running constantly

[Ice Dragon]

Hey, I am having a few problems with my Linux box. The main problem is the Harddrive running non-stop. This could cause the HDD to wear out quickly. Also, I think that it is also the reason why xwindows are running slowly on the computer as well.

I did do some searching of this problem already, but I haven't found any solution yet. Any help would be appreciated.

I guess I should tell you the specs for the computer: Pentium II 400 mhz, 256 mb RAM. Running Redhat 7.3 newly installed using server setup. Also, the computer might actually have two HDDs. I'll need to check with my dad on that.

[mdwatts]

Is the HD led on constantly or does it just blip every 5 seconds or so?

If every few seconds, then you must be using a journalized filesystem such as ext3 or ReiserFS as the disk writes are scheduled for 5 second intervals.

[Ice Dragon]

It's on constantly, no flashing.

[vbraca]

Check if updatedb is running on your machine ? File to check should be /etc/locate.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by vbraca
Check if updatedb is running on your machine ? File to check should be /etc/locate.

'updatedb' should only be scheduled (through cron) to run once per day and only takes a minute or two.

Check your processes to see if you can spot what is constantly accessing the HD.

ps ax

OR

top

[Syngin]

Very small chance this is the case but run 'top' and see how much of your swap you are using.

Note: Did anyone else see HDD and think hard drive d (ie. like hda and hdb) rather than Hard Disk Drive?

I think my mental move to Linux is complete :D

[dalek]

Is it possible that it is indexing the drive. When I done mine it took about 6 to 7 hours with the CPU at 99%. After the first time though it only takes a few minutes to update. No idea why it took so long though. It may take a while on your 400MHz machine though, if that is what it's doing.

It does search a lot faster though.

[Ice Dragon]

Ok, I used "top" and I found that out of 35 possible process to be running only one was running. All of the swap space is free and most of my memory is free as well.

I used ps ax, but I'm not sure what to make of it.

[DMR]

Originally posted by Ice Dragon
I used ps ax, but I'm not sure what to make of it. try "ps aux" instead. That will give you % of CPU and memory use for the processes; look for a busy process.

[tarcintr]

is it happenning after installing a program or not

maybe gift or a problem like that makes a database
i have waited nearly 2 hours completing that.

[Satanic Atheist]

I had a similar problem months back with Red Hat 7.3.

I tweaked the SMB.CONF file and it started writing log files several times a second.

Check the contents of /var/log with ls -l and see if there are any massive files in there. If you check it every few seconds, you can see one growing huge. Kill the process by doing ps -aux and then kill -9 and the PID (Process ID number) or killall -9 and the name of the program.

In a matter of 5 minutes I had something like a 180Mb log file and it was growing. I kept deleting it (small HDs) but it kept growing!

Read the log files and if it's obvious which program it is, e-mail the authors with a snippet of the log file and tell them of a serious self-denial-of-service bug in their software. I did it to the samba team and they agreed that it could cause a problem and would investigate.

James

[DrSoCold]

I had a problem like this on an old Windoze PC a few years back. The control hardware/software on the HDD was screwed and was making the drive permenently seek. The machine was hardly usable. The way I diagnosed it was to start the PC using a bootdisk, I then just browsed the filesystem and found that the problem still existed. I salvaged what data I could from the faulty HDD (using the lovely laplink!) and bought a new one.

I wasn't using Linux at the time though, this was on a DOS/Windows setup, but you may be able to rule out a software or hardware fault by trying it this way (you don't need to access the Linux filesystem, just the floppy). I guess those old DOS bootdisks may come in handy after all?.

Good luck with your prob.