Hard Drive Continuously Spinning

English Hardware
1

Hello All,
(It’s been a while since I last used Linux and I need some help).
I am running Suse 12.1 and my hard drive light is CONTINUOUSLY on. Worse, about every 3 or 4 shutdowns/restarts the system fails to start with an fsck error.

When the system fails to start, I can boot using a like KDE USB stick and I have run fsck on the unmounted drives (/dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdb3). The system then restarts OK for a while.

Right now, I am only using the maching to browse the web. Starting Firefox will almost always cause the disks to start spinning continuously. Chrome has the same problems if I visit any pages that have Flash content (most sites).

The symptoms are pretty typical: the HDD light stays on, the “Start” button take about 2-3 minutes to bring up the start menu. Trying to visit any URL just hangs the browser (FF or Chrome) with the Hourglass icon spinning away. After about 3-5 minutes of this, the URL may or may not come up. It seems that all of these symptoms are the result of a disk continuously spinning.

My machine has two hard drives: one 320GB drive and one 500GB drive. The 500GB drive only contains some VMWare virtual machines and is mounted at “/vms”. The 320GB drive contains the “normal” stuff and mount points.

  1. What are the utilities available in SuSE to make sure that my disks are OK?
  2. Is there any way to identify which process is writing to the disk?
  3. What information can I post to help you help me figure out what’s going on?

At this point, I am surprised that my Win7 laptop is much more reliable than my SuSE desktop. So any help you can give is much appreciated!

-tomas

2

Type this in a terminal: top

What process/s are making the load?

3

Also try in a terminal free -m to see if you are having to use swap instead of ram (possibly a memory leak somewhere? <cough>flash</cough>)

4

Try “iotop” command, possibly with -o option.
“iotop -o” will show what causes most I/O on your system (only processes that are actually reading/writing something).

btw.
How much memory do you have?
If less than 2GB, you should

  1. stay away from KDE, and try xfce or gnome instead. Also avoid using chrome/chromium.
  2. enable zram (actually, you can enable it even if you have lots of memory - virtual machines, and browsers are always memory hungry).

I have Midori browser with flash installed on my tiny server (768MB+zram, 8GB microdrive that has 10MB/s max throughput :P), and no problems with it.

5

zram +1

One thing I have noticed since I enabled it is that my laptop takes longer to come back from sleep (or suspend or whatever it is called). Don’t know if that is zram, or KDE4.8, or the new kernel, or because it is very cold outside…

6

On 02/01/2012 12:56 PM, sobrus wrote:
> btw.
> How much memory do you have?
> If less than 2GB, you should
> 1) stay away from KDE, and try xfce or gnome instead
> 2) enable zram

sorry, VERY different opinion:

i have a low powered Atom, 1 GB RAM, no zram, and find KDE4.6.0 on
openSUSE 11.4 32 bit to be wonderful fast and smoooth…dependable and
predictable (with desktop effects turned off) and the open ‘intel’ video
driver…[full hardware and software details in sig]

except, i can expect Flash to get stuck and loop video, or echo audio,
or die and put up a frown face every 48 hours, or 48 minutes or if a
bird flies over the house or a mouse scratches its nose in China or or

and, here is two other different opinions:

http://en.opensuse.org/Hardware_requirements

http://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/html/openSUSE/opensuse-startup/art.osuse.installquick.html#sec.osuse.installquick
and look down to paragraph “1.1.1 System Requirements”

–
DD http://tinyurl.com/DD-Hardware http://tinyurl.com/DD-Software
Read what Distro Watch writes: http://tinyurl.com/SUSEonDW

7

(Sorry for the late response)

“iotop” is not a recognized command. Going to see if I can install it.
My machine has 4GB RAM.
I am using XFCE already.

Assuming that I can install “iotop” anyting in particular I should look for?

-tomas

8

Whenever the machine hangs, there are 3 items that are almost always at the top:

“Xorg”, “kwin”, and “kworker”

Should any of these tie up the hard drives?

Someone else suggested installing “iotop” to see if that helps identify what is going on. I will be installing that next.

Thanks for your help!

-tomas

9

Those could cause it
Make sure desktop effects is disabled. You can toggle effects on/off with Atl+SHIFT+F12

Might be worth logging in to a IceWM session and see if it runs without issue there
You need autologin disabled and have to choose the session at the login screen.