Arch Linux

sw8511

Member

Registered: 2005-06-09

Posts: 11

Constantly blinking HDD Light

I'm using KDE with Arch Linux 0.7 and when I am logged into an account, the hard disk access light flashes
continuously, even after hours of inactivity. The blinking is very regular and brief (there is about a second
delay between flashes). There is no blinking when I'm logged off.

I've got an MSI-K8TM motherboard (VIA chipset) and 2 Seagate HDDs.

A little paranoid, I first ran chkrootkit to make sure my machine hadn't been hacked into! All seems ok.

To convince myself that the flashing LED was showing HDD activity (and not some unknown special warning!)
I used gkrellm to monitor the HDD activity - gkrellm can monitor read and write accesses seperately, and I
noticed that the weird flashing corresponds to write accesses.

I had a look at /proc/diskstats, but I couldn't make out anything from that, except that there is much more
activity on my main drive (for the simple reason that I only mount the other one when I need to - I tried
disconnecting the second drive just to see if it made any difference,
but it doesn't).

Since the problem appears to occur only when I'm logged on, I ran "ps aux" while logged off, and then
again immediately after loggin in and compared the two outputs. The processes which run when logged
on and not when logged off are listed below:

root      6208  0.0  0.0   1464   480 tty1     Ss+  20:00   0:00 /sbin/agetty 38400 vc/1 linux
steve     6278  0.0  0.2   4760  1364 ?        Ss   20:04   0:00 /bin/sh/ opt/kde/bin/startkde
steve     6318  0.0  3.1  33596 16292 ?        Ss   20:04   0:00 kdeinit Running...
steve     6321  0.0  2.9  32376 15008 ?        S    20:04   0:00 dcopserver [kdeinit] dcopserver --nosid
steve     6323  0.0  3.1  33624 16300 ?        S    20:04   0:00 klauncher [kdeinit] klauncher
steve     6326  0.0  4.2  54788 21640 ?        Sl   20:04   0:00 kded [kdeinit] kded
steve     6345  0.1  1.4  19744  7532 ?        S    20:04   0:01 /opt/kde/bin/artsd -F 10 -S 4096 -s 60 -m      artsmessage -c drkonqi -l 3 -f
steve     6347  0.0  3.4  34052 17852 ?        S    20:04   0:00 kaccess [kdeinit] kaccess
steve     6348  0.0  0.0   1452   340 ?        S    20:04   0:00 kwrapper ksmserver
steve     6350  0.0  3.5  34152 17964 ?        S    20:04   0:00 ksmserver [kdeinit] ksmserver
steve     6352  0.0  4.1  36836 21096 ?        S    20:04   0:01 kwin [kdeinit] kwin -session 10cdcfd761000111671252300000057670000_1117897645_540226
steve     6406  0.0  5.0  40468 26000 ?        S    20:04   0:00 kdesktop [kdeinit] kdesktop
steve     6422  0.0  4.6  39284 23828 ?        S    20:04   0:01 kicker [kdeinit] kicker
steve     6424  0.0  3.8  35508 19588 ?        S    20:04   0:00 klipper [kdeinit] klipper
steve     6433  0.0  3.3  33748 16944 ?        S    20:04   0:00 kio_file [kdeinit] kio_file file /tmp/ksocket-steve/klauncherT3vJ3a.slave-socket /tmp/ksocket-steve/kdesktopTCi7lb.slave-socket
steve     6434  0.0  4.4  38240 22832 ?        S    20:04   0:00 kmix [kdeinit] kmix -session 10cdcfd761000111731380400000064200042_1117897645_535683
steve     6440  0.0  4.2  41292 21928 ?        S    20:04   0:00 knotify [kdeinit] knotify
steve     6446  0.0  4.4  38448 22780 ?        S    20:04   0:00 konsole [kdeinit] konsole
steve     6447  0.0  0.3   4932  1652 pts/13   Ss   20:04   0:00 /bin/bash
steve     6456  0.0  5.3  40244 27404 ?        S    20:06   0:00 konqueror [kdeinit] konqueror --silent
steve     6517  0.0  0.1   4344   836 pts/13   R+   20:30   0:00 ps aux

I don't know if any of these are abnormal or suspicious.

I thought maybe it could have something to do kjournald (I have ext3 partitions) writing the journal, but
then  kjournald runs while I'm logged off too, and then there's no HDD activity. Also I used to run KDE3.2
with  Mandrake with the same partitions, and never had this weird HDD activity and flashing LED.

I searched google and found the following posts relating similar problems with KDE with other distributions
(see links below). They point towards the autorun process, but I don't have that running according to the
ps listing:

Problem encountered by a Red Hat user:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora- … 03342.html
continued here:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora- … 03387.html

And another user:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.w … 4898b60bf8

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated,
Steve

vacant

Member

From: downstairs

Registered: 2004-11-05

Posts: 816

Re: Constantly blinking HDD Light

add noatime,notail into fstab options

seelk

Member

From: NJ

Registered: 2005-04-07

Posts: 38

Re: Constantly blinking HDD Light

If yours is constantly blinking mine is never blinking when I'm in Arch.

---

"smooth as seelk"

jbromley

Member

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2007-02-04

Posts: 268

Re: Constantly blinking HDD Light

If yours is constantly blinking mine is never blinking when I'm in Arch.

I get the same constantly blinking behavior. It's may a tenth of a second of activity every 2 seconds or so. When I'm working and it is quiet it drives me crazy.

Seelk - what file system are you using? I'm using all ext3, but in the past I've used reiserfs and I don't recall ever having this problem. (I would remember if it had happened, as it annoys the hell out of me.)

Thanks.