Re: Disk access just before shutdown power off.

[Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux@googlemail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 3:34 PM, James
Courtier-Dutton<James@superbug.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> When I shutdown my Linux laptop, it does an orderly shutdown with quite
> a lot of HD activity during shutdown which eventually stops when the
> screen goes blank. Then there is some delay (5-10 seconds) and then a
> quick flurry of HD access just before it powers itself off.

Either your BIOS does something very weird with your disk
when OS commands it to power off (unlikely),

or your system is set up in a way where there is no visible
output when X is killed, but the system (Linux) is still
running (shutting itself down).

Some distributions get fancy ideas about "not scaring users
with this text output scrolling up at boot & shutdown".

This has nice side effect of users not noticing any
potentially useful messages at boot or shutdown. :(

--
vda