Disk access *every* 5 seconds?

[Udo Burghardt <Udo.Burghardt@gmx.de>]

Hello list,

keeping uptodate with testing I am running KDE 2.2 since it is 
available without Problems. Thanks Ivan!

My last update was yesterday. And now I have a periodical access to one 
harddisk (/usr) _exactly_ every 5 seconds. One can hear the heads 
moving two times with a delay of less than one second. This cycle 
repeats precisely every five seconds. Running xosview I can see the 
SCSI-Interrupt flashing once and the DISK activity states 69K for this 
cycle of measurement.

This activity is new. And it is bad: it heats up the harddrive and more 
worse it crashes my system after some hours by freezing the system. 
I was able to log in via ssh but I was *not* able to execute a single 
command because that remote logon shell also freezes after hitting 
Enter without executing the command.

I am posting this here to the kde-list because:
* I am starting my machine in runlevel 2 without those noises
* when I leave KDE the disk access stops
* it does also happen with a fresh test user account without any KDE 
settings (no old .kde directory)
* it does also happen when I start KDE as root (for the first time 
since a long time) to verify if it is permission related
* it does *not* happen when I start fvwm95 instead of kde

I have tried to find out which process is responsible
* by ksysguard
* by top in konsole and on a text console with KDE in the background
withour success. There is simple no process with a significant Cpu 
usage. I have also tried to locate the trouble-maker by killing some 
processes randomly. That is not a good approach...

Then I did lsof several times every ten seconds and looked for 
differences. No success.

So my question is simply: how can I find out which process triggers 
disk activity every five seconds?

System information: 
Kernel 2.4.14-k6,  AMD K6-III, 400MHz, 448 MB Ram, IDE-Burner via 
ide-scsi. 
The harddisk in question is a Seagate ST39140W on an Adaptec AHA2940. 
/usr mounted on /dev/sdc5, lof of space available, using reiserfs

Thanks for reading this.

PS: this is my first posting to this list and addtionally the first 
posting with KMail (running on another machine with SuSE), so 
if there is something formal incorrect please tell me.
-- 
Udo Burghardt