[CentOS] Constant disk activity

On 4/13/05 8:01 AM, first last wrote:

> I am running centos on a laptop and the HD keeps on making noises every
> so often, even when I go to runlevel 1 and stop everything that could
> be doing so (hotplug, smartd, cron, anacron, atd, syslogd...).
> 
> Is there any way of finding out what is accessing the disk? Not only it
> shortens battery life, it is annoying while working in a quiet room.

My hunch is that it's kjournald. Do you have ext3 filesystems on that 
machine?

You can test it:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
# wait for disk access to occur
dmesg

Once you're done, poke 0 into the block_dump setting to stop your kernel 
log from overflowing. :-)

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> www.madboa.com