Hard drive light is constantly on. What's using it?
Solution 1
Download iotop and run it to see which process is accessing filesystem :
sudo apt-get install iotop
sudo iotop -P
Solution 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...
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Guage
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Guage over 1 year
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...
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mikewhatever over 10 yearsYou can use
iotop
from the repositories to check what processes are using the HDD. I'd also recommend switching to a more recent release, as 10.04 is really old. -
Avinash Raj over 10 years10.04 obselete version,so this question should be closed.
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Lewis Goddard over 10 years@AvinashRaj While there have been several releases since 10.04 that would be preferable in most situations, it remains a supported release.
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Guage over 10 yearsFor folks like me who enjoy running the older versions these threads are helpful. Makes no sense to remove information that can still be of value to others.
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Guage over 10 yearsThanks.. Thats one of the first things I did and that's how i knew the only thing the I/O was doing was writing to the journal - jbd2/sda1-8 ;o)
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neoexpert almost 4 yearsyeah thanks, i found out snapd was writing permanently to the disk, so i removed it.