Good hunting!

GOT IT . I ran the rsync while it is ticking. What do I do now, Isaac? Addendum: This time it started while my daughter was using her account. She logged out, I logged in (both tumbleweed), I ran rsync, and posted on LQ, all while the disk was busily ticking along...

My guess would be a stuck head in the drive, I just had one. See https://youtu.be/WNJqTPutrJ4 which includes example sounds near the beginning. A stethoscope would help if the room's noisy.

Can I point out that what you are complaining about appears not to be a problem?

This thread was a good education about hard disks. It's now TWO YEARS OLD. I have a fairly logical brain and extensive experience in cracking previously unseen problems in previously unseen equipment. I raised a family of three kids on the strength of it.


You will NOT GET nto the bottom of this one because you are not prepared to make the kind of greatly personally inconvenient elimination tests that would nail it.
I gave this a good try, as you can see. Give up, young man. If you're paid at $1 per hour for your time and effort, you could have bought a much better pc for yourself.

So my contention is that it's not a repair problem; It's a personal obsession for you. Your family and friends deserve better from you. It will continue to annoy you while it exists, but people are more important. I can't see that as an issue; Two years have passed and everything is fine. That's long enough to kill any box. Buy an SSD if it pisses you off. And close this thread as solved - UNSOLVABLE.

Two years? Did that stop Google from finding it? Stackoverflow is practically writing textbooks. There's so much old Linux stuff out there that I've learned to check the date before I put too much stock in it. Plenty of obsolete documentation that amounts to misinformation. I forget what this thread was even about, I just found it trying to nail down a problem with a laptop drive in a USB adapter plugged into a Rasberry Pi. Through all the layers, it came down to a mechanical problem of a stuck head. Which this video helped me get unstuck enough to recover data from. https://youtu.be/WNJqTPutrJ4 And I'm 63.

Sure. Never said it was. I have only two. And a ticking disk .
<edit> The thread is just 13 months old btw. Any bets whether it will be solved before it gets 2 years old? </edit>

You lost me there. I just re-read all 80 posts and made sure I followed up on all suggestions. Please give the number of the post with the suggested elimination tests you refer to -- I found none I omitted. Sure. But where would be the fun in that? I certainly won't. It does not get my ire or whatever. I do want to LEARN. Is that so foreign to you? ("LinuxQuestions.org - where Linux users come for help" --anyone? ) And yes, I'll persevere in my free time even when I drop out for the moment since I'll want to cook dinner for my kids .

@ab1jx Thanks for the suggestion, but the drive is working all right. There are just activities at times the cause of which I do not understand. That is what the thread is about: What process is accessing my drive at times like a clockwork?

After skimming this thread - mostly for entertainment, I don't have any solution to offer - I'm afraid that this poor disk will die of old age and disintegrate into dust before the problem is solved. Did Timex make that disk? "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking!" Or maybe the Energizer bunny had something to do with it? (Slogans from American TV commercials, for those of you in different parts of the world.)

I admire the O.P. for putting multiple years into the troubleshooting process. Talk about being persistent! I couldn't do that myself. I personally go by the saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No need being a damn fool about it." I would have just bought a new disk and done a clean install of a newer OS update.

Thanks .




I did exactly that. I moved my System from the ticking beast to a SSD about 2 years ago. But I like to understand the gadgets I use.


Fun fact: I have currently 6 OSs on my PC. Yesterday evening I booted into an older tumbleweed from a second (not ticking) HD and lo and behold, at some moment the same ticking started. It never does that when I use a non openSUSE system...

It is doing it again while I was browsing with firefox. First a short burst of activity on the disk, I ran immediately top in a console and caught "Web Content" as the most active process (I/O and CPU wise). Now it is back down to regular ticking and "Web Content" is still active. Google doesn't find a process of that name (or I'm searching the wrong way), neither does "ps ax | grep web". After posting I will stop firefox and report if that was the culprit.

No such luck.

Oh, and for those who think this is just a waste of time -- I am planning to move my system ("/") and /home to a SSD. There I won't hear either the starting burst of disk activity nor the subsequent (write?) accesses. Would I get a creeping wearing down of the SSD since I don't know when to act?

I don't know about SSD exactly but there's recently a "high endurance" bunch of SD cards. Made for dashcams and other video surveillance because they apparently are writing constantly, then they overwrite the oldest stuff. A few of us are trying them in Raspberry Pi computers, mine are fine so far (not over a month or so). You could leave an SD in a USB reader and mount that to your mountpoint. There's a Transcend 400x 128 GB, I think that's the biggest. I have one of those and a Sandisk Extreme 64 GB. Article at https://www.carcamcentral.com/guide/...sk-ultra-cards

Pricipally a good idea -- but my machine has only two USB 3.0 ports which would lessen / negate the advantage of a SSD directly connected internally via SATA.

Not to mention the fact, that I want to understand what is happening in my machine .