[PLUG] Constant disk activity

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 16:59:25 -0800
John Jason Jordan <johnxj at gmx.com> dijo:

>Ever since my recent dist-upgrade from Xubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 I have
>been having continual disk activity. Every 30 seconds or so the drive
>light comes on and stays on solid for about five seconds. The disk
>activity is so intense that other operations are hindered, even mouse
>movement is jerky.

I also have an error message that I have been trying to fix:

	Error: no symbol table
	Press any key to continue

My research indicates that this is a grub error, and the Ubuntu forums
include numerous posts about it occurring after a dist-upgrade from
16.04 to 18.04. I haven't done any of the suggested fixes yet because
they are kind of scary, and the error is fairly benign - do nothing
and the system goes ahead and boots normally anyway. However, just now I
looked at /var/log/boot and, lo and behold, there are probably a
hundred or more identical messages:

[K[ [0;31m*[0;1;31m*[0m] A start job is running for dev-sda2.device (10s / 1min 30s)

So apparently the JBD2 process started during boot. Why it targets
only /home and not / or the three other drives that I have; and how one
might get it to run only every half hour or so, are questions that I
have not yet come up with answers for.