Hard drive activity every 5 seconds or so

[travisf]

Hi - I'm using Xandros on an IBM A30 notebook - not sure if my problem is brand-specific or not. But every 5 seconds or so the hard drive is accessed for about 2 seconds even when totally idle, screen blanked out etc. Really becoming annoying. Any help much appreciated. Where would be likely problem areas to look.?
TF

[sether]

You can check out what processes are running with top(1) or ps(1) and then kill(1) whatever processes you think are useless and/or are causing the HDD to be accessed constantly. Here's an example:

$ ps aux

...

user  12000  0.0  0.2   276  1248 C0  S     12:26PM    0:00.35 /usr/local/bin/evil-process
$ killall evil-process

or

$ kill -9 12000

You might need to be root to kill some processes. Use su or sudo to do this. And be careful not to kill important processes.