hdd constant activity

[tom_d]

about every two or three seconds, my hd activity light flashes once or twice and the drive clicks like it's reading/writing. Is there anywhere that logs what it's doing?

[askrieger]

Re: hdd constant activity

What I would do, is to run the command "top" from a konsole and look to see which process (or processes) moved up in the list when the drive was clicking. That might give me a clue as to what was happening. Does this happen all the time, or only occasionally? If it's occasional, it will be harder to find, but it matters a lot less.

[tom_d]

Re: hdd constant activity

ok- top definitely shows it happening

it's constantly jumping around, so I'm going to try to catch the PID USER and COMMAND entries as they come up

(this is all happening above 1 root init)

5943 tom konsole
4789 root Xorg
4213 haldaemo hald-addon-stor
5016 tom kicker
5961 tom top
5558 tom firefox-bin

sometimes there is nothing above 1 root init
then it can be anywheres from 1 to 4 of the others pops up, no particular order or pattern that I can see. They just come and go, sometimes individually, sometimes in sets ) I'm thinking that top and firefox-bin are showing up because both are running at the moment?)

it happens every 2 - 5 seconds, constantly as soon as the machine is up and running and never stops

[tom_d]

Re: hdd constant activity

less frequently

6146 tom artsd
5021 tom kwin (if I change the window size)

[askrieger]

Re: hdd constant activity

Because it's your disk that seems to be called excessively often, I would be suspicious of the hald-addon-storage process. I would think the next thing to try would be to kill that process by giving the command "kill -9 4213", that will send the hald-addon-storage process (number 4213) an unblockable stop signal. This might have any one of three results. The disk might stop cycling with the system continuing to run, the disk might stop cycling with the system crashing, or (if I'm wrong about which process is doing what) nothing at all might happen. Please let us know what happens.

[tom_d]

Re: hdd constant activity

Because it's your disk that seems to be called excessively often, I would be suspicious of the hald-addon-storage process. I would think the next thing to try would be to kill that process by giving the command "kill -9 4213", that will send the hald-addon-storage process (number 4213) an unblockable stop signal. This might have any one of three results. The disk might stop cycling with the system continuing to run, the disk might stop cycling with the system crashing, or (if I'm wrong about which process is doing what) nothing at all might happen. Please let us know what happens.

a couple of questions first:
"the hald-addon-storage process" is what, what does it do / what's its purpose?

"kill that process by giving the command "kill -9 4213""
does this requre sudo, and do I have to be in any particular directory when doing it?

"the disk might stop cycling with the system crashing"
how do I get the system back after that?

[tom_d]

Re: hdd constant activity

Because it's your disk that seems to be called excessively often, I would be suspicious of the hald-addon-storage process. I would think the next thing to try would be to kill that process by giving the command "kill -9 4213", that will send the hald-addon-storage process (number 4213) an unblockable stop signal.

I've just been watching the top cycling, and scrolled down to find there are four
"hald-addon-stor" processes running, as 4212, 4213, 4215 and 4216. Does that mean anything to you?

[askrieger]

Re: hdd constant activity

Re. your questions:
!) I'm not sure exactly what the hald-addon-staorage process does, that's why I have no idea what will happen when you kill it.

2) Yes it does require sudo, sorry about that. and you can be in any directory when you kill a process because you're sending a command to the kernel.

3) If your system crashes, just reboot.

4) Not really, I have four hald-addon storage processes running as well and my disk isn't cycling, which makes me wonder whether I"m right. On the other hand, none of my hald-addon-storage processes is in the top 40 processes in my top list.

[tom_d]

Re: hdd constant activity- STILL NOT SOLVED

Re. your questions:
!) I'm not sure exactly what the hald-addon-staorage process does, that's why I have no idea what will happen when you kill it.

2) Yes it does require sudo, sorry about that. and you can be in any directory when you kill a process because you're sending a command to the kernel.

3) If your system crashes, just reboot.

4) Not really, I have four hald-addon storage processes running as well and my disk isn't cycling, which makes me wonder whether I"m right. On the other hand, none of my hald-addon-storage processes is in the top 40 processes in my top list.

seems like it's not just my problem . . . and nothing these folks suggested made any difference either . . . anyone else like to try to solve this one?
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...c2384e&t=44238

[padre999]

Re: hdd constant activity

Also see http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=36976 for more information.

One way to get the hdd quiet is to install the "laptop-mode" package and do a

sudo laptop-mode start

But this is no solution of course.

[askrieger]

Re: hdd constant activity

If you go through the referenced Ubu forum thread, you will find that the package maintainer suggested installing "laptop-mode-tools" instead, because it's newer and better debugged. However, "laptop-mode-tools" is installed by default in Kubuntu, so all you have to do is start it. In a konsole, run "/etc/init.d/laptop-mode start". If that quiets your hard drive, you can add that line to your /etc/rc.local script.

[tom_d]

Re: hdd constant activity

tried that- made no difference at all :-(

[padre999]

Re: hdd constant activity

tried that- made no difference at all :-(

What did you try? Laptop-mode, laptop mode tools, or both?

[tom_d]

Re: hdd constant activity

followed askrieger's post a couple up
""laptop-mode-tools" is installed by default in Kubuntu, so all you have to do is start it. In a konsole, run "/etc/init.d/laptop-mode start"."

[askrieger]

Re: hdd constant activity

I must admit that I wasn't too sure that the advice in that thread would work anyway, because laptop mode (or the newer laptop mode tools) are designed to turn off the disk when it's NOT being called, and your disk seems to be called every few seconds, or less.

I suppose you could try that "no atime" thing that was mentioned on one of the threads on the Ubu forums. It assumes that the disk activity is caused by checking all the files every few seconds to see whether they've been changed, but that doesn't seem to me like something that anyone would do. It's much simpler to just change the atime when you access the file. There are structures in the file system that hold that information, and system calls that read and write it in the standard libraries, and they've been that way for at least 25 years. I don't think Linus would put up with a file system that stupid, especially when you consider the current controversy about Reiser4.

I'm still inclined to think that one of the processes started by "hald", the hal daemon, is the problem. To amplify a little (which is all I can) about the Hardware Abstraction Layer Daemon. Basically, it's part of the effort to remove device drivers from the linux kernel and run them in user space where failures are less catastrophic. So, instead of having ALL device drivers in the kernel, they removed all the ones that conformed to the HAL spec (as more and more do all the time) and substituted the HAL daemon to perform kernel i/o operations for all of them (it's called "isolating the problem"). And that's pretty much all I know. I have no idea why HALD needs four processes for managing addon storage, nor do I know how addon-storage is defined, I wouldn't have thought that a hard drive was addon storage, but I don't speak Finnish.