Defrag Constant HD accessing 738

hiwa

Pertaining to the info within the above link I wish some of the more experienced Linux users would comment on editing, maintaining these cron files. I too have experienced this *seemingly* random once-in-a-while "thrashing" -- where the HDD heads are actually clanking from time to time whilst it's locked in Disk Access (i.e.; *almost* nothing else seems to be able to snap it out of this mode). When it's doing this, it's like the HDD is trying to read the whole parbreastion (obviously it's sorting-organizing data) in a race to see how fast it can accomplish this (my ' ' is 20GB). At first, I was seriously concerned about some sort of a weird security breach, so I ended the Disk access by first; yanking out the ethernet cable from the NIC - then immediately and continually having to press ctrl-alt-del and ctrl-alt-backspace to try and kill X -- which eventually I was able to stop it ...somehow.

I'm running Debian Sarge (3.1r1); # uname -a Linux localhost 2.4.27-2-386 #1 Wed Aug 17 09:33:35 UTC 2005 i686 GNU-Linux

I have KDE (most elements) and GNOME (some to most elements) installed...I *had* been using Konquerer quite a lot, but have switched to using lighter apps (Epiphany as a browser) and Console-Konsole as a FM (until I can find a decent light GUI version of a FM).

FWIW - concerning *runlevels* - as a newcomer to linux, I have learned that Debian defaults to *runlevel2* (init 2) during it's init(?) and start of X (Server) and (Clients).

Here's a piece of myetc-inittab; # lessetc-inittab

#etc-inittab: init(8) configuration. # $Id: inittab,v 1.91 2002-01-25 13:35:21 miquels Exp $

# The default runlevel. id:2:initdefault:

# Boot-time system configuration-initialization script. # This is run first except when booting in emergency (-b) mode. si::sysinit:-etc-init.d-rcS

# What to do in single-user mode. ~~:S:wait:-sbin-sulogin

#etc-init.d executes the S and K scripts upon change # of runlevel. # # Runlevel 0 is halt. # Runlevel 1 is single-user. # Runlevels 2-5 are multi-user. # Runlevel 6 is reboot.

l0:0:wait:-etc-init.d-rc 0 l1:1:wait:-etc-init.d-rc 1 l2:2:wait:-etc-init.d-rc 2 l3:3:wait:-etc-init.d-rc 3 l4:4:wait:-etc-init.d-rc 4 l5:5:wait:-etc-init.d-rc 5 l6:6:wait:-etc-init.d-rc 6

Apologies; I'm not quite sure how to differentiate the terminology yet when discussing XServer and Clients, and AFAICT, running either or both does NOT mean a GUI is open at all....

I've found an informative html doc about the X Window System within; file:---usr-share-doc-xfree86-common-FAQ.xhtml and am studying-reading it through...

I recall having to do this command after my recent re-install of Debian; # updatedb --localpaths=(I think that's the command that finally worked, which enabled 'locate' to work correctly for me, since my entire install resides entirely on the ' ' parbreastion only - only just for now though).

Originally - after trying to use *locate* -- I received an error similar to; updatedb error; cannot findvar-cache-locate-updatedb -- your database is more than 1 week old

that's not the error message exactly though, and after perusing the various logs invar-log and other places, I cannot find the exact error right now.

Thanks to all for the info and resolutions (and discussions) in this thread :-)