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I am trying to get an old P.C. working so that I can use its floppy drive to read some old diskettes. It boots from an Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS DVD but it has a really bad, "cursor drag," as I call it. When I type a command in a terminal window, it takes a few seconds for each, successive character in the command to be displayed on the screen. The response is painfully slow. I assume that this is being caused by some hardware component failing and throwing excessive interrupts against the system. The CPU is at 100%. Hence my question: is there a way to determine which hardware is throwing the interrupts. I realize this is not an operating system question, but maybe someone here knows of a way.

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    Have a look at the `/var/log/kern.log` to see which... – George Udosen Sep 01 '18 at 20:58
  • Could be a failing piece of hardware, or something rather obvious, like an old graphics card that can't handle Unity. – mikewhatever Sep 01 '18 at 21:41
  • **Off-topic [XY](https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/66377/287151) comment:** to clone your floppy disks, you can try to use [another lightweight distribution along with `ddrescue`](https://github.com/crushedice2000/olddrescue) or even with some modern over-engineered [specialized controller](https://www.kryoflux.com). – 0x2b3bfa0 Sep 01 '18 at 22:48
  • Also, you can buy a cheap USB floppy disk drive to some Chinese on-line sellers or even, if you're lucky, in you local computer store. – 0x2b3bfa0 Sep 01 '18 at 22:54
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    Related to your question: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/25203/how-can-i-know-which-irq-is-responsible-of-high-cpu-usage – 0x2b3bfa0 Sep 01 '18 at 22:58

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