[HLUG] Excess hard drive activity

[Chris Owens]

  Dear All

     Recently tried to upgrade from Jaunty to Meerkat but the disk I had 
couldn't cope with Error 11 that arises from the change  from Grub to 
Grub2. Ended up with wrecked boot sector and therefore access to 
anything. Managed to salvage most of the data using a live disk and then 
to re-partition and re-install Jaunty.

     Since this, Windows is OK, I can boot to Ubuntu but mostly (not 
always) to a system where after the first request say open Thunderbird 
starts the hard drive spinning endlessly up to say at least 10-15 mins 
to no obvious purpose, the mouse pointer is frozen or eratic, the 
machine locked up, the system monitor variously showing blocks of 0% or 
100% usage, [Cntrl][Alt][Delete] or [Backspace], [Alt][F2]'Killx' or 
attempting to energise Icon 'Forced Quit' had no effect. The only 
possibility was just to turn off but then I found that 
[Alt][PrtSc]r-e-i-s-u-b usually (but not always) stopped the drive at 
-i, (-u unmounts the system and -r reboots).

     As far as I can tell, nothing is written to the disk, the system is 
not infected, routine hardware tests seem OK, and if I boot Ubuntu 
through Recovery Mode, perform the first stage of fsck I notice 
something like a dmsg line 'Recovering avgd' then via 'Resume Normal 
Boot' I usually have a usable system.

     Anyone have an idea what is going on here, is it housekeeping 
following my multiple attempts at just crashing out of the system before 
I discovered the [Alt][PrtSc] command?

Thanks folks

Chris