[CentOS] External USB disk devices cause high load

Sat Mar 14 13:09:23 UTC 2009
Tom Brown <tom at ng23.net>

Hi

On a CentOS 4.7 box running on older hardware when i plug an external 
flash disk or similar into the system the device shows up in dmesg but 
it is not usable. The load on the system starts to climb for no apparent 
reason. If i try to look at the partitions on the disk with fdisk it 
just hangs. If the device is removed the load remains high.

Does anyone know what processes are responsible for USB as top is not 
really showing me much.

thanks