ubuntu 5.10 read hard disk intensively and lock the keyboard, is it a bug?

[Apatewna]

chen ge wrote:
> i have to power off and restart.
> 
What exactly do you mean "read hard disk intensively". You noticed the 
disk light staying permanently lit?
And "locked keyboard"? Did Caps/Num lock work? Did the mouse move?

I noticed something similar, intensive hard disk activity while 
receiving emails in Thunderbird and it was happening just a couple of 
minutes after the desktop came up.
I quickly entered console run "top" and found "updatedb" running. My 
system is quite fast to handle such a load (Athlon XP2600+/1G RAM/80G 
ATA DISK) so after a while it was back to normal. I notice this thing 
happening once every week or so, and didn't give it much attention.
If your hardware is kind of slow by definition and the "updatedb" 
kicked in, you could possibly encounter an almost total lockup of the 
system. Other than that your disk may have a bad sector.

You can always run "updatedb" to test my theory.


-- 
Thanasis Rizoulis
Electronic Computing Systems Engineer
Larissa, Greece
Linux User #358384