My main machine is a Linux machine Ubuntu (and I love it) but I have also a Windows PC. What is irritating me that I continuously hearing my harddisk. I have this also on my laptop. Does someone know what the cause is?

Johannes

Not a Linux question---moved to General.

Which machines have the noise? Linux PC, Windows PC, or Laptop?

What kind of noise? eg: Is it the continuous spinning of the drive, or are you hearing the random "chattering" associated with read and write activity?

Has it (they) always made the same noise, or is this something new?

The Windows PC or the Ubuntu PC? With Windows it could just need a defrag

It is the windows machine. I have disabled the defrag but no luck. .

1. <Someone> explain what de-frag has to do with this.

2. Please answer my other questions.

Don't 'disable' defrag, you need to defrag.

It is read and write activity. I thought the cause was the defragmentation. Therefore I disabled it to check if it works. Today I heard the noise again. I hear the noise only if I'm doing nothing on the PC. I have my two machines (linux and pc) linked with a switchbox to one monitor and keyboard. When I am working on my Linux machine I hear the noise of the Windows machine.

The pc is now silent. But I expect when I reboot the Windows pc I will hear the noise again from some time. I think although I have disabled the defragmentation he is still defragmentating.

Your question is kinda vague....

1. This isn't a linux question....
2. What kind of noise are you hearing? Check the drive light on your system. If it is constantly running when running windows, check how much memory you have in the system. If you have less than 512MB of RAM then you probably don't have enough RAM and are paging. If you are running Windows XP SP3 then you may want to up to 1GB of ram to reduce paging.

It might be the fast search/indexing that Windows/office does. I think you can turn it off on a per disk basis by setting it in the preferences window for the disk.

That's one of the things that really annoys me about windows when the disk starts accessing for unknown reasons. If its not the search, its the damn virus scanners.

With my linux box I'll hear my disk start accessing and without looking I'll go... "Ahh, it must be 23:59, that'll be updatedb doing its thing"

I have had Windows systems that would keep churning away for many minutes after it appeared that bootup was complete.

Before I stopped using Windows, I had practiced a bit of folk wisdom---namely: "reinstall at least once per year". I had MANY situations with Win2K where various strange problems got fixed by re-installing. I have no knowledge of the validity of this folk wisdom for anything more modern.

I now solve Windows problems by not using Windows---it is amazingly effective!!
YMMV

Well, most probably it indeed is indexing or a scheduled virus scan.
Btw., we have a lot of windows2k boxen at w0rkplace that haven't been reinstalled for 5 years and still (unless some hardware quit in between) they are working fine. Because noone works as admin user, that is.
Uhm ... there is a new ("new brooms sweep best") windows guy planning to move everything here to Active Directory, which probably will kill nfs and give a hard time to the (few) linux boxen

My best-guess is that it's updating its indexes of files and file-contents.

The notion of "you've gotta reinstall Windows once a year" is, IMHO, strictly for-the-birds. Hey, we all know that "Windows smells bad," but even Windows does not smell that bad...

Does a software (Windows) defrag help prevent hardware (Hard Disk) noises???
Is this really true???

Linux Archive

What kind of noise? If it's a "whirring" sound, the bearings in your harddrive are worn out.
If it's a clicking sound, be sure to have backups as well - it might be frequent head recalibration attempts due to misalignment detected (worn-out servo or something like that).
If it's just the head movement sound that disturbs you, get a good mp3 player or a shielded harddrive mountcage, or use rubber spacers on the mount screws.
And then, no, defrag will produce disk noise (head movements) while it's running, but won't significantly reduce that noise afterwards.
Btw. ... what about _Linux_ questions?

deleted--no longer relevant