Description of problem: Currently, as my computer sits in Gnome... or even KDE my hard drive light will come on... come off... come on... come off. It is in regular intervals and stays lit for only 1/2 a second, and then waits 2 seconds and comes on again. I have no programs running, and the screensaver is even off. The system monitor shows nothing running, and I have shut down all of my daemons. I had Redhat 9 installed and then switched to Fedora, but I am finding no relief from this problem. These are fresh installs after I installed all of the updates to each of the OSes... has anyone else had this problem... or does anyone know how to fix it? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Installed Fedora Core 1, or Redhat 9 then update using YUM, on this hardware: Motherboard: Asus P4PE CPU: Pentium-4 2.4ghz 512k cache Memory: 512 mb pc2700 Hard Drive: 40gb... I think it is 100m/s Steps to Reproduce: 1. Turn on computer 2. Log into Gnome or KDE Expected results: Hard drive light will flash on and off consistently forever. Additional info: I noticed if I killed MAGICDEV and another process I can't remember now, it would considerably slow down the hard drive light flashing... but it did not stop. This would happen for days on end, from a base install of FC1 or Redhat 9 that had been updated. I wouldn't be doing anything to the computer. NOTE: This same behavior does not occur with Mandrake 9.2, or Debian. Also, this only happens if you are in X-Windows. If I went to runlevel 3 it wouldn't do this anymore.
The other process I killed was eggcups. I'm not sure if either of these are the problem... but I am just saying when I killed these, it slowed down the blinking of my hard drive light. Once again, this is only Redhat 9 after updated using YUM and FC1 from a fresh install. This does not happen with other distros on the same hardware.
I found out some additional information. In GNOME this problem occurs because of magicdev. In KDE the problem occurs because of autorun. The same problems occur because of both. I read some more on the net, and it seems that it might be due to a combination of LITE-ON cdrom drives and ASUS P4PE motherboard. One guy reports the same stuff happening in Windows 98... ??? I have a LITE-ON 52x24x52x CDRW.
I pulled the LITE-ON cdrw drive out, and put in a different one, and the blinking stopped... something to do with Autorun, and Magicdev. Once again, the only way to get the hard drive light to shut off, is to kill Autorun in KDE, or Magicdev in Gnome... or remove the LITE-ON cdrw drive. I think these two processes need to be patched.
Closing. Magicdev has been removed in favor of gnome-volume-manager in devel branch.