Computer grinds to halt on hd access

marsonist · n00b Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Posts: 32

My computer (Athlon 2400XP w/ 1GB RAM) pretty much grinds to a halt when anything is accessing the hard drive. My X cursor will flicker and/or stop moving. Everything bogs down and seems to take forever. At first I thought it was because I had opted to not use a swap partition (I do have a gig of ram) but that wasn't a problem under SuSE, and SuSE is far less slick that Gentoo. Not to mention that my available physical memory is not even being completely used. Any thoughts or suggestions?

Steve

Woland · Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2003 9:30 am Post subject:

Take a look through this thread and perhaps it will help you out.

Type man hdparm to find out about the progam which the thread is talking about.

marsonist · n00b Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Posts: 32

That seems to have done it

Thank you sooooo much. I tried searching the forum before posting, but I guess I wasn't using the right words. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

marsonist · n00b Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Posts: 32

On to next probem, it seems like everything hdparm does reverts to normal on reboot

Woland · Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2003 12:58 am Post subject:

Hdparm needs to be set at boot time. In gentoo, you have /etc/conf.d/hdparm to help you.

marsonist · n00b Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Posts: 32

Oh, you folks are just too good. Your fix worked like a charm and continues working, now, even through reboots. I am trying to ween myself of of my (ex)favorite distro, SuSE, because the handholding, while nice for beginners, doesn't leave you a lot of room to learn on your own. Gentoo was a million times easier to install than I figured it would be (the fact that it even booted after compiling my kernel for the first time surprised the heck out of me) and you really feel like you have learned something after your (Pretty Much)-all said and done.

You've been a great help...
Thanks

ravon · Posted: Thu Jul 10, 2003 12:57 pm Post subject: