Hard drive light is constantly on. What's using it? [closed]

Question

The HDD light is lit solid all day and the system has slowed significantly.

Running i7 with 15.3Gb RAM on 10.04

Read though many threads online and checked the I/O which seems to be negligible and only writing to the journal - jbd2/sda1-8

The fsdsk shows that sda1 is healthy and in good form.

looking at glances things look good:

             Ubuntu 10.04 32bit with Linux 2.6.32-54-generic-pae on ######

CPU       2.7%                   Load   8-core   Mem    12.2%     Swap    0.0%
user:     1.5%  nice:     0.0%   1 min:   0.38   total: 15.3G     total: 4.88G
system:   1.2%  iowait:   0.0%   5 min:   0.47   used:  1.87G     used:      0
idle:    97.3%  irq:      0.0%   15 min:  0.53   free:  13.4G     free:  4.88G

Network    Rx/s    Tx/s   Processes 273,  1 running, 272 sleeping,  0 other
eth0       336b    288b
lo           0b      0b    VIRT   RES  CPU%  MEM%   PID USER       NAME
                        83M   64M   4.5   0.4  1524 root       Xorg
Disk I/O   In/s   Out/s     14M    9M   3.2   0.1  4130 igie       glances
sda1          0       0     58M   19M   2.6   0.1  3615 igie       gnome-terminal
sda2          0       0    2.6G  1.0G   1.9   6.6  2452 igie       blender
sda5          0       0     81M   66M   1.6   0.4  1827 igie       compiz
sdb1          0       0    167M   23M   1.0   0.1  1829 igie       pulseaudio
sdc           0       0       0     0   0.3   0.0    67 root       ata/5
                             5M 1000K   0.3   0.0  1859 root       udisks-daemon
Mount      Used   Total    654M  156M   0.3   1.0  2217 igie       chrome
/         81.6G    113G      3M    2M   0.0   0.0     1 root       /sbin/init
_a/Media   288G    587G       0     0   0.0   0.0     2 root       kthreadd
_Windows  41.3G   58.7G       0     0   0.0   0.0     3 root       migration/0

Blender is running. but its not doing anything.. just sitting there.. even if I close Blender the HDD light still stays on...

Trying to figure out what's slowing down the system...

Answer 1

Download iotop and run it to see which process is accessing filesystem :

• sudo apt-get install iotop
• sudo iotop -P

Answer 2

So i'm not sure what was happening to my machine but it only started giving problems after one of the routine ubuntu updates. Then stuff started to fail. clicking the restart button just brought up a small blank window and programs started failing... After a forced shutting down I was stuck at boot up and wasn't able to get past

BusyBox v1.17.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.17.1-10ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands

(initramfs)

After much digging I found this thread which got me back up and running:

Can not boot! initramfs error!

The steps that worked for me were:

The following step is for removing the i-node

In the terminal I typed

sudo debugfs -w /dev/sda1 debugfs 1.41.11 (14-Mar-2010) debugfs: clri <8> debugfs: quit After that restart the system and again boot into the live cd

In the terminal type

sudo fsck -yv /dev/sda1 It will work.....definitely

After logging into the desktop in the terminal type the following commands

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get autoclean sudo apt-get check

Hope it helps someone else...