Nick Selby wrote:
On Saturday 10 August 2002 10:58, Basil Chupin wrote: <snip>
For several weeks now I have been trying to resolve why my HD was/is being accessed every 5-seconds. I have now found out that, in my case at least, it is not resiserfs per se which is causing this constant "HD hits" but Win4Lin which I have installed with SuSE (v8) and with reiserfs. (I am in correspondence with NeTraverse about this.) Someone in this forum mentioned a couple of weeks ago that when he shutdown seti-at-home on his system the "HD hits" stopped.
Interesting. I don't have the latter but I do have Win4Lin3.0 on my machine, and installed it only recently.
What I found is that I have no "hits" if I boot SuSE without Win4Lin but as soon as I boot with Win4Lin the 5-second accessing begins :-(.
Oh, great.
I did some testing today and found that it is not the Win4Lin patched *kernel* that is causing the problem but the Win4Lin program component - and you don't need to have Windows installed to start getting the "hits". If you have Kernel-Win4Lin and Win4Lin3 installed and both running and you then execute "rpm -e Win4Lin" on a command line the "hits" immediately stop.
Hmm. Uninstalling it after paying for it and going to significant trouble to get it working sounds like a poor solution, but I suppose that it's better than having my hard drive eaten...Goes to show that introducing MS products into any computer, regardless of how, causes problems, don't it!
Have you heard anything back from the crack customer support team at Netraverse, or have you only asked the question in the last 48 hours -the period during which they seem not to reply as a matter of principle?
I would be interested to know what you find as the cause of your "hits" when/if you find it.
I'd be interested in hearing what they say on the matter. I'll email them too, and two days from now I can post their reply.
Many thanks for this post, Nick
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A the time of writing this response to you, I received a reply from NeTraverse suggesting that it was reiserfs (which clears bffers every 5 seconds as programed by the authors) and Windows which writes to the HD constantly (!) [but not when I am running Windows neat on my machine :-)] and so resierfs keeps clearing the buffers every 5 seconds- hence the "hits". This reply from them was even after I told them that one doesn't have to be running Windows to have the 5-second "hits", and it was after this that I did some more testing and found what I described in my previous message: one does not need to have Windows installed at all and that the "hits" start as soon as the Win4Lin component is installed. This piece of information I sent them within their 48-hour "time limit" to respond but because this was over the weekdend I will have to wait till at least tomorrow for a reply from NeTraverse. What I do now is to boot with Win4Lin when I want to use a Windows application but then reboot just with Linux for most of my 'work'. This way I only get the "hits" for a short time while I am in Windows. A pain in the ass but.... And if it wasn't for my scanner (a Canon which even SANE doesn't have a driver for :-() I wouldn't have bothered with Win4Lin. Cheers.