Panther, Hard Drive Never Stops Spinning

rfimbel

rfimbel

Registered
I upgraded to Panther (v10.3.2) yesterday. Today I noticed that my hard is constantly spinning (or at least that's what it sounds like) -- it never stops. I launched Disk Utility and disabled Journaling because I thought maybe that was the cause but it didn't make a difference. I am not sure if the this is causing a performance problem but the noise is driving me nuts :mad:. Anyone have a clue about this?

System Info:

G4 Power PC
Single CPU
CPU: 733 MHz
Memory: 1.5 GB
 
Unless you have the Energy Control Panel set to spin down your HD, it will always be spinning. Is that what you mean? Or do you mean you can hear it reading/writing by the clicking sound it makes?

This isn't new to Panther either, but if you do have the control panel set to spin it down and it's not, then that could be a problem with the upgrade. Try repairing permissions with DiskUtility if that's the case. You can also turn journaling back on because it's only updated when you write to a file, so when you are doing that the HD will be spinning anyways.
 
Thanks for the reply.

It sounds like it's reading/writing.

The Energy Saver is set as follows:

  • Put computer to sleep if inactive for 1 hour.
  • Put display to sleep if inactive for 15 minutes.
  • Put hard drive to sleep when possible.
 
I think it stopped (don't hear anything).

I went into Disk Utility amd ran "Repair Disk Permisions."

I am not sure if this is what fixed the problem or if it was a coincidence.

Wouldn't Journaling need to check the entire disk the first time around (after upgrading) could this have taken several hours?
 
I should only make an entry into the journal when a change is made to a file. It could have been disk indexing. You can check by selecting your HD and pressing COMMAND+i and expand the part that says Content Index. If it has today's date, it could have been the index that was being updated. This allows for faster searching of files.
 
Captain Code said:
I should only make an entry into the journal when a change is made to a file. It could have been disk indexing. You can check by selecting your HD and pressing COMMAND+i and expand the part that says Content Index. If it has today's date, it could have been the index that was being updated. This allows for faster searching of files.
Click to expand...

I thought you were on to something. I checked it. It was last indexed Nov 19, 2003. :confused:
 
I thought the problem was solved but it's back. I shut the machine down last night --- this morning after restarting the drive is cranking away again.
 
When the HD making noise, you could try opening the process viewer in /Applications/Utilities and see if there's anything taking up a lot of CPU time. If there is, that could be the program that is causing all the activity.
 
Indexing is automatic in Panther. I believe indexing takes place only on Friday afternoons. You can stop indexing in the Finder Preferences. Open the preferences, select Languages and uncheck ALL languages and this will stop indexing.
 
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