Weird i/o problem with laptop and 7.3.4.5

Does anyone have any ideas about this one?

I created a large empty database on a laptop with no problem. Next, I began to import a database from a development box, by usernames. I got suspicious of the import after checking the disk i/o and the progress of the import. Basically, it was importing like a dog, with the disk i/o running at about 95% plus. When I broke the import the i/o stayed at 95% ish, with no other task running.

There is nothing running in DBA_JOBS. Nobody is connected to the machine. When I shutdown the instance i/o drops down to virtually zero. The moment I start the instance back up, it returns to nigh on 100% disk utlization. I have an SGA of about 70MB and about 40 MB available physical memory left on the machine, so it does not appear to be a memory problem. Because this happened earlier in the week too, I rebuilt the instance from scratch, using a slightly hybridised init.ora file, just to ensure I have no unwanted parameters sneaking in.

I'm really at a loss on this one. I've never experienced anything like this in a great many laptop installations. It must be something that the import is bringing in, but the source database is not suffering with it, and if I clear out all but SYS/SYSTEM and DBSNMP, it STILL persists!

If anyone has any suggestions, I'll be very grateful.

Mark Received on Thu Sep 28 2000 - 20:32:43 CDT