hd led blinking

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Caneri
Posts: 1513
Joined: Tue 04 Sep 2007, 13:23
Location: Canada

#16 Post by Caneri »

Just the government spying on your computer, nothing to worry about
As far as I know the long red flash is the USA gov...the short flashing is the Israeli gov and the middle is the Arab gov along with the Chinese and Russians so no need to worry....it's just the "Watcher".

I had this as well to be honest....If you don't mind, then, they won't mind.

It's a browser thing.

Eric

PS...I run without a hdd so no matter to me...you see.
[color=darkred][i]Be not afraid to grow slowly, only be afraid of standing still.[/i]
Chinese Proverb[/color]

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Flash
Official Dog Handler
Posts: 13071
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 16:04
Location: Arizona USA

#17 Post by Flash »

Ted Dog wrote:...I noticed it as well on a DVD booted machine without a HD about every six seconds
Well then it couldn't possibly have anything to do with accessing the hard disk. What else could it be? Could ramdisk cause the light to flicker?

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Karl Godt
Posts: 4199
Joined: Sun 20 Jun 2010, 13:52
Location: Kiel,Germany

#18 Post by Karl Godt »

In former times i have read , that the linux kernel created a virtual ramdisk of a fixed size,
that can be adjusted at kernel compile time,
( also the amount of automatically created ramdisks in /dev/ram* )
to load the initrd.gz into.
That's where the bootparameter root=/dev/ram0 derives from.

Puppy's older kernels up to 2.6.33.2 and above had a ramdisk size of 12-13KiB .

Very recent kernel configurations have that increased since such a ramdisk is used for full installations to perform the file system check,
since a full installation does not use an initrd.gz,
so loads all the needed programs and libraries into that ramdisk,
unmounts the partition and performs the filesystem check ending with a reboot,
but the sizes of the libraries have incresed already from 4.3 to Lupu
and now they wont fit anymore into the 12-13kib ramdisk .

I worked around it myself by using two ramdisks : one for /lib and one for all the other programs in /etc, /bin, /sbin .

You could test it like
bash-3.00# ls /dev/ram*
/dev/ram0 /dev/ram11 /dev/ram14 /dev/ram3 /dev/ram6 /dev/ram9
/dev/ram1 /dev/ram12 /dev/ram15 /dev/ram4 /dev/ram7
/dev/ram10 /dev/ram13 /dev/ram2 /dev/ram5 /dev/ram8
bash-3.00# disktype /dev/ram0

--- /dev/ram0
Block device, size 16 MiB (16777216 bytes)
Blank disk/medium

and of course create an ext2 filesystem like

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mkfs.ext2 /dev/ram0 && mkdir -p /mnt/ram0 && mount /dev/ram0 /mnt/ram0 && cd /mnt/ram0 && echo "HUHU, I am in $PWD : )"


The point is now, that the kernel nowerdays loads the initrd.gz directly into a temporary tmpfs filesystem, that has no fixed size,
so no "real physical ramdisk" is used anymore by default and the kernel manages this all in ram and discards the initrd.gz after it had finished switching root.

I believe that since the HDD LED in the front side of a computer case is attached to the mobo, the BIOS/CHIP/CPU is sending the impulses to that joint, not the HDD directly. Whatever the real cause is, it might be that the BIOS simply is programmed to expect a HDD and therfore sends signals, or the cable is wrongly attached/damaged .

Fallingwater
Posts: 9
Joined: Tue 12 Apr 2011, 14:16

#19 Post by Fallingwater »

Sorry for the thread resurrection, but I'm having a similar issue, except my HD access is a lot more intense, about once per second. I can hear the heads move as something accesses data. I have a 2GB swap partition, but according to swapon -s it is currently mounted but not being used.
Q5sys wrote: Here they are. But as I mentioned.. iotop requires python to run. (its a python script)
According to the package manager it is installed, but running iotop returns:

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 bash: /bin/iotop: /usr/bin/python: bad interpreter: No such file or directory
I'm running Slacko 5.5.

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