Tracking HD activity

[Craig Routledge]

On 2007-11-13 10:35, Giles Orr wrote:
> The hard drive light on my computer has been flashing about once a
> second for a week or more now, regardless of what's going on on the
> computer.  It does this even when I kill all user programs and close X
> entirely, so that eliminates a huge block of programs right there.  Is
> there a program similar to "top" for disk usage?

You could try "lsof -X".  You need to be root if you wish to see processes 
owned by root.

> Any other suggestions on how to track down the culprit?  I suppose I 
> could use "kill -9" on every process listed by "ps ax" until it stopped, 
> but I'm trying to find a more elegant solution.  Thanks.

That could be dangerous, since signal 9 doesn't give the process a chance 
to shutdown cleanly.  Some of those processes do low-level stuff.

Personally, I would hesitate to even do an ordinary kill unless I knew what 
the process did.  It might make a mess which is difficult to diagnose and 
clean up later.

To safely eliminate the largest number of programs at once, you could 
switch to runlevel 1.  If it still does it then, that's very strange.

> Partial system specs:
> Debian testing
> Linux glo 2.6.21-2-k7 #1 SMP Wed Jul 11 04:29:08 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
> AMD 2700+, two HDs, two optical drives (all IDE)

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