2.17 runs fast from CD, SLOWLY after installed (Solved)

[JDP]

I'd appreciate any advice on this one.
Hardware is: Toshiba Dynabook 600mhz processor, 128m ram, 12gig HDD - partitioned with 500meg linux swap partition, the rest EXT3. Puppy is installed frugal with Antix (Lightweight Mepis).
Puppy live CD runs perfectly and quickly. Monitor on taskbar correctly shows how much of swap partition is unused; little box beside it shows very little red unless I'm busy using the computer.
Problem is as follows with both a conventional (only puppy as o.s.) or frugal installation:
As X starts, the hard drive light gets very busy and stays that way constantly, even after the desktop is visible. Monitor on taskbar shows how much of pupsave is unused (in frugal installation - how much of HDD is free in conventional), little box beside it always shows half to three quarters red. Mouse cursor is jerky, all programs are mired in molasses.
Starting with pfix=nox prevents problem.
My guess is that something starts with X, but can't load properly and keeps scratching around on the hard disk trying to do something, keeping cpu and other system resources busy.
I have no real idea what happens with X, and what the difference is between installed and live versions. Is there something I can simply edit out of some file to stop this happening?
Thanks again for any advice.

[HairyWill]

Opening a console and running the command
top
would help to track down the offending process
for comparison here is mine

Code: Select all

Mem: 451608K used, 55580K free, 0K shrd, 41872K buff, 313392K cached
Load average: 0.19, 0.30, 0.39    (State: S=sleeping R=running, W=waiting)

  PID USER     STATUS   RSS  PPID %CPU %MEM COMMAND
 3768 root     S <      12M  3767  0.2  2.6 X
 4246 root     S       1756  3804  0.2  0.3 pmount
 5527 root     R        46M  5522  0.0  9.4 seamonkey-bin
 5119 root     S        12M  3804  0.0  2.5 geany
 3804 root     S        11M     1  0.0  2.2 ROX-Filer
 5084 root     S       8048     1  0.0  1.5 gtkdialog3
 6635 root     S       4512     1  0.0  0.8 mini-volume.tcl
 3780 root     S       2928  3767  0.0  0.5 jwm
 6637 root     S       2248     1  0.0  0.4 blinky
 6633 root     S       2100     1  0.0  0.4 freememapplet
 3612 root     S       1988     1  0.0  0.3 cupsd
 6631 root     S       1900     1  0.0  0.3 xload
 4022 root     S       1868  4021  0.0  0.3 bash
 7543 root     S       1864  7542  0.0  0.3 bash
 9107 root     S       1860  9106  0.0  0.3 bash
 9106 root     S       1856     1  0.0  0.3 rxvt
29888 root     S       1832 29887  0.0  0.3 bash
 4021 root     R       1820  3804  0.0  0.3 rxvt
 7542 root     S       1732  3804  0.0  0.3 xterm

[NinerSevenTango]

You could boot into puppy and look at /var/log/messages and var/log/Xorg.0.log to see if there is anything interesting in there.

Possibly you could boot off CD, copy those files to hard disk somewhere, then compare with the ones generated off a standard boot. The differences might show you what's going on.

--97T--

[JDP]

Solved!
Thanks HairyWill. Your suggestion showed me that the swap partition manager was the culprit. Problem was, when I partitioned the hard disk, I made hda1 the swap partition. Seems Puppy couldn't cope with that. Re-partitioned the hd with hda1 the filesystem and hda2 the swap and all is sweet.
Thanks again to both of you