[ubuntu-uk] Churning hard disk, glacial startup

[Matthew Daubney]

On Sun, 2009-06-21 at 08:29 +0100, Paul Webster wrote:
> Hi (again)! I'm a relative newcomer to Ubuntu, a refugee from the
> Windows Wonderland, and I like it very much. However, lately the hard
> disk churns and churns, almost all the time, and startup is very slow.
> Even writing this email has taken a long time, because sometimes
> everything else comes to a halt.
> 
> Please, somebody, help!
> 
> Paul


Hi Paul,

There's a couple of places to look to find the rogue process. First have
a look in top (open a terminal, type top) and that should give you a
list of everything that's eating your resources. If it's HD thats being
eaten, install iotop (open a terminal sudo apt-get install iotop) and
then run it (in a terminal type iotop) and that will tell you what's
using all of your IO. 

Have a look at those, see if you can identify whats eating your HD, then
report back and we'll see what we can do :)

-Matt Daubney
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