Ubuntu :: Hard Drive Suddenly Starts Spinning And Won't Stop ?
Mar 5, 2011
I've been using Ubuntu 10.x for several months without any major problems. Everything was fine until this week.
In the past few days there's been a strange new problem. When I turn my computer on, it works fine for 10 minutes, and then the hard drive suddenly starts spinning and won't stop. While this happens the computer is virtually unusable. Mouse moves slow and jerky; apps don't respond; and eventually the windows close by themselves, the whole screen goes blank, and the system reboots. The whole process takes a long time, sometimes 30 minutes.
The only change I made just before this problem started was upgrading Firefox Beta 4 version 10 to the latest version 11. So, I deleted it, and went back to the latest stable version 3.6.x. That seemed to fix the problem for a day or so. But then it started happening again. I deleted all signs of Firefox; it still happens. So it's not a browser issue.
I am stumped. Today I started my computer and just let it sit there without opening any programs at all except the system monitor. It ran fine for the usual 10-15 minutes, nothing changed out of the ordinary in terms of computer resources used in the system monitor, and then suddenly the drive started spinning wildly again .....
Right now my computer's been on for 10 minutes and I am typing this message .... but who knows what will happen right now.
I've bought a new notebook. The hard drive won't stop spinning down and then spinning up again during load. I don't want HD power saving, so I disabled it within
I have an HP Mini 210 and I recently performed an Upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04 and noticed that the netbook is much more noisy now (and can get very warm). I am not sure wether is the fan or the hard drive spinning. I did a "top" but no process was high consuming. I also thought that maybe compiz could be responsable for it, so I disabled all the visual effects, but still no change.
Mac Hard Drive Data Recovery is needed when your disks are not spinning up, hard drive unmountable, killed a hard drive without backing up, or if you have experienced a hard drive crash.
I recently bought 320 GB Trancend external hard disk and working fine days back.Earlier i could copy from and to the hard disk with out any issue. I dont know what happened after that now i am not able to write any files in to the external hard disk. This is not NTFS formatted device. here is some of the out put from terminal.
Code: sundar@sundar-sundar:~$ fdisk -l Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
I have a PC which I built ~3 years ago which had been running smoothly and silently until recently. Now, the CPU fan likes to spin up to 1200-1500 RPM even when it's idle, which is rather annoying. I have not made any recent changes (software-wise or hardware-wise) to it.
I installed the lm-sensors and hddtemp packages (via apt-get) and configured them. Here's a typical output at steady-state, where the computer's been idle for a while and the fans have been spinning for the same while:
These all seem fairly normal to me, so I'm perplexed as to why the fan continues to run at such a high RPM. What does the ALARM that's reported for in6 mean? Is it important? I've been playing around with the fancontrol daemon, trying to see if I could get better results than with the default fan management. Using the pwmconfig utility, I generated the following /etc/fancontrol file:
# Configuration file generated by pwmconfig, changes will be lost INTERVAL=10 DEVPATH=hwmon0=devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:18.3 hwmon1=devices/platform/it87.552 DEVNAME=hwmon0=k8temp hwmon1=it8718 FCTEMPS= hwmon1/device/pwm1=hwmon0/device/temp1_input FCFANS= hwmon1/device/pwm1=hwmon1/device/fan1_input MINTEMP= hwmon1/device/pwm1=35 MAXTEMP= hwmon1/device/pwm1=60 MINSTART= hwmon1/device/pwm1=180 MINSTOP= hwmon1/device/pwm1=100
This only sort of works—as soon as I enable the fancontrol daemon, the fan shuts off at first (good), but the temperatures of the 7 different sensors slowly rise, even when everything is idle. Eventually, when the Core0 Temp sensors goes past 35°, the fan comes back on, and then it alternates from being on and off at around 500-700 RPM, as the temperature goes back and forth across the boundary. It's certainly much more pleasant than 1200-1500 RPM, but it's still far from desirable.
Here's an example of the sensors output in that situation: $ sensors k8temp-pci-00c3 Adapter: PCI adapter Core0 Temp: +36.0°C Core0 Temp: +38.0°C Core1 Temp: +34.0°C Core1 Temp: +30.0°C it8718-isa-0228 Adapter: ISA adapter ..... cpu0_vid: +1.100 V
I opened up the case, and the CPU heat sink felt warm but not excessively hot. I tried taking off the heat sink, cleaning off the thermal paste, putting on new thermal paste, and putting the heat sink back on, but that didn't seem to have much of an effect, if any. The two other heat sinks—one on the built-in AMD 780G graphics chipset and the other on the AMD SB700 southbridge—felt noticeably hotter than the CPU heat sink. So, my question is this: What should I do to get this computer back to the state where the fan is off when it's idle? Can I solve this with a smarter fancontrol configuration?
I cleaned out the heat sink and fan as best I could with compressed air (there wasn't a whole lot of dust, but I got rid of what I could), but still no dice. Rebooting into the BIOS configuration gives me the same results—the fan still runs at 1100-1200 RPM, and the system and CPU temperatures are reported as 40-44°C. Should I add another fan? The integrated GPU and the SB heatsinks felt significantly warmer to the tough than the CPU heatsink. The BIOS reports a system fan speed and NB fan speed of 0 rpm (since I don't have more than one fan).
If I use Gnome, is "gnome-power-preferences" the only place where I can configure the system to stop or not to stop spinning HDD as a power saving tool? Is there any other option outside GUI?
fine until I wanted to copy files. I tried two a hundred something MB files. But I had to interrupt the process because the server was working the HDD like crazy. Judging by the speed the progress bar and the crazy hdd sounds, the server tried to copy the whole thing into the memory, of which the server doesn't have much, so started swapping in swapping out and writing the the file to the destination at the same time. How can I stop the nfs server doing that, and make it copy the files straight to the disk?
as much as i love ubuntu i am finding my desktop machine attached to the tv set a nightmare.it has ubuntu studio installed and everytime i want to access the movie drive ( which in XP used to be the d: drive) it asks me for a password to access the drive.as much as i like the idea of security this is one step too far for this machine.
I am a regular ubuntu user from 7.10 till now. Now I am using 11.04. This problem never happened with previous releases. When I open more than 4 windows in firefox or whenever I open "Ubuntu Software Center" the hard disk keeps spinning, mouse and keyboard are frozen. I tried to reboot from tty1. It takes around 3 minutes to get the command prompt after pressing Ctrl + Alt + F1. I reinstalled 11.04 several times. This problem is not solved. I have applied all the updates. What program is exactly causing this problem?
When I run Ubuntu liveCD (Lucid), even when no programs are running and cpu is 98% idle, the CD Rom continues spinning constantly, even though it apparently isn't accessing any files. At this rate, the motor will burn out prematurely.I don't think this is normal. How can I troubleshoot this and keep it from running?
If I let my computer sit for about 10 minutes, I lose all the windows I had open (gnome) and i get a message saying I'm running in low graphics mode. I have to restart X in low graphics mode to get it to work. i can't tell the difference, but as an avid writer, I often feel the need to get up and think about whatever I have open in oowriter.
I am using a toshiba sattelite L300 laptop, and i am facing severe overheating issues as a result of the cooling fan Barely even spinning / not spinning at all.
Temps have been as high as 110 degrees, It's extremely frustrating.
I'm trying to install v10.10 on my Sony Vaio VGN-NS150J, 4gb ram, 2gb core 2 duo, 320 gb HD...to no avail. The live CD boots, but the dvd drive stops spinning after i click the install button...the one that says i can't turn back. Nothing seems affected by quitting the install. I have no idea what to do except to not turn back to VistaOS. I intensely dislike that "operating system".
Just over the past few days Firefox 3.5.8 now starts as soon as the desktop has loaded - it's not set to do this in 'Startup Applications' - how do I stop it starting on boot?Also, over the same period, if I click a javascript link, nothing happens, it no longer opens the relevant page or image; so I click it again and still nothing, however several minutes later the page/image may open, but not always.Also if I close Firefox, then later click a link in an email it no longer opens Firefox - I then have to go into 'System Monitor > Processes', find and then 'end process' for Firefox (cause it's sleeping) before I can actually start it.I've gone in Synaptic and 'reinstalled' Firefox, but it made no difference. I cleared the cache and all cookies as well - could something have got into Firefox, and if so how can I fix it ?
I'm using karmic 9.10 32 bit with kernel 2.6.31-20-generic-pae update - it appears it's a javascript problem within Firefox as I can no longer open the popup window for online banking from my banks webpage link - I can do this in other browsers such as Epiphany, Google Chrome and Opera, but not in Firefox
I am using fedora 14 64 bit, using Dell latitude E6410 suddenly my wireless stop to work, in other laptops it is working. I hooked up the internet (non wireless) to my laptop and then he sign. i restart my laptop few times, how to diagnosis the problem..
I randomly started up my laptop one day and the mouse and keyboard stopped responding once GDM's login screen came up. Everything works fine from the console, but even if I run startx from the login shell the mouse and keyboard do not work, even though everything else in GNOME runs perfectly.
I am using an HP dv6426us laptop running Ubuntu 9.04 (i686 architecture with the 2.6.28-15-generic kernel). Below is a copy of my xorg.conf file, just in case there might be something wrong with that. I will try and put more information on, but seeing as I have to use a different computer to post this thread, copying over log files and stuff is difficult for the moment (though I am going to try and copy them over to a flash drive).
I have tried 504 i386 and 505 i386 both downloaded on an Athlon on an Abit board 20Bb hd old Hitachi monitor both load, but do not complete the boot up they suddenly stop and the monitor goes off only the setup is ever displayed the hardware is working, i just had another system on it.
Using Gnome and openSUSE 11.2 . Ok. I changed few keyboards to see if that is a hardware problem . Obviously its not. Whatever keyboard layout I choose .. same story repeats : USA , SRB, GER... I tried to change "key to chooose 3rd level option" in keyboard preferences: right alt, right win , left alt , left win ... but nothing works .
when starting my Latitude D830 from suspend to ram it was suddenly missing touchpad and trackpoint support. I restartet and updated but still, both devices aren't even listed in yast anymore. Keyboard and bluetooth mouse work fine, though. Running synclient TouchpadOff=0 says Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?. Now, i googled a bit and all i could find was some tinkering with the xorg.conf, what is especially ugly, since suse doesn't normally use one anymore. Plus, xorg.conf gives me flashbacks of allnighters trying to fix me system again
I want to start recording when someone starts talking, and stop recording when it becomes silent. I guess if there is stream audio processing tool like ImageMagick, so I can strip away blank sections like this:
I installed F14 and I have been having some issues with the usage of the ram memory. Here is the situation: while working with firefox, amsn, and VLC, suddenly the system stop responding, I just can manage to check system monitor and the ram is at 89% (of 1GB) and the swap at 50% (of 1.4GB). I can do nothing then I just switch off the machine. After that using the same applications everything is fine. I was using F12.
I have a strange problem where my machine will suddenly stop responding to connections while still remaining partially connectible. Here's an example sequence of events I have taken (numerous times). If anyone can spot something else I should check or has seen these symptoms before please let me know.1) System is using an Edimax 7318-usg, Ubuntu 10.042) Wifi connection is working, with power management turned off (iwconfig)3) Signal strength does not cause the connection to drop (confirmed with router logs)4) When in a ssh session on the problem machine suddenly the ssh session is dropped "host is down"5) When I attempt to re-initiate ssh it fails, no route to host...6) Pinging it fails, accessing a webpage hosted on it fails, all access fails7) The machine I'm pinging/sshing from still has a good network connection8 ) I check my routers DHCP leases, problem machine still has a valid lease.
9) Router still shows problem machine in routing & arp table & shows active traffic going to and from (I checked the routers states and bandwidth monitor for this)10) I try sshing and pinging the problem machine from the laptop on the local network, it still fails, no route to host, wtf?11) I go to the problem machine physically, wifi connection is up with decent signal12) ifconfig indicates it still holds an IP address13) I open a browser on the problem machine, any webpage loads fine14) I ping the laptop from the problem machine, ok15) I ssh from the problem machine to my laptop, it works16) At this point I ssh from the laptop to the problem machine, sometimes it works sometimes it fails(it seems that pinging/sshing the laptop FROM the problem machine sometimes makes it connectable again).
17) Usually if I wait a while the problem machine will randomly become connectable again at random intervals18 ) The only reliable way to make the problem machine connectable again is manually reconnecting it to the wireless network19) I tailed auth.log ufw.log, etc. nothing suspicious disallowing my ssh connection20) dmesg shows nothing unusual, as far as I can tell, just some activity negotiating WPA keys and suchBy looking at the timestamp for the WPA negotiation and cross referencing the router bandwidth monitor I can tell the WPAnegotiation doesn't make it drop the conectionSo that's it, lol.
suddenly it stop detecting a memorystick being plugged in. I connect but nothing happens. At this time i can plug in any memorystick and it want detect it. Then i need to reboot to get it to work and then after avail it stop working again. I also have problems with unmounting (Safely remove device) in the GUI-tool. It works in terminal with "umount". In Dolphin i get error about problem accessing HAL or something like that. This problem is resisting even after reboot. Is there a bug?
I got a dell inspiron 1501 laptop with a 80Gb sata drive what is the best solution to add data storage space for someone that love to have multiples operating systems at hand Note: I use mostly linux so I won't need to change my laptop for many years maybe ...
My parents bought a new hard drive for a laptop that I've owned for several years. It's much larger than the current one, so I plan on splitting it up to dual boot it with Ubuntu.I have no problem with partitioning a drive (I always keep a LiveCD handy), but my question is this: how can I go about moving the existing partition to the new drive? This is a laptop, so I can't simply plug the new drive into another slot.
Also, even if I manage to move it, will Windows still work on the new drive in a larger partition? I've had this laptop for quite a while, and I've lost the recovery discs that came with it a long time ago. I also have a lot of software without CDs to reinstall them with. This makes not reinstalling Windows a high priority.
Trying to install Fedora 12 using the 6 CDs. Trying to install on an older x86 box.Problem is that when detecting my hard drive, Fedora 12 recognizes it as a sda hard drive instead of hda hard drive. I have no SCSI connected to my computer what so ever. It's an old fashion PATA Western Digital hard drive.If I proceed with the install, Fedora 12 only installs 200MB of the OS from the first CD only. No options for additional software or anything.
I have a laptop with only 30GB storage and I want to install Lubuntu in virtual box but Lubuntu needs 5GB of storage space which i dont have. Could i use an external 160GB hard drive to act as the hard drive for the virtual machine without affecting the files that are already on the external hard drive
