Re: Western Digital GreenPower drives and Linux

["Mike Snitzer" <snitzer@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 5:00 PM, Tvrtko A. Ursulin <tvrtko@ursulin.net> wrote:
>
>  > >I got back from WD's tech support and received a DOS utility which can
>  > > control this drive feature, apparently using vendor specific commands.
>  > > With it head unload timer can be disabled or set to a period between
>  > > 100ms and 25.5s.
>
>  Followup with some good news.
>
>  Head unload timer settings seems to be persistent across powering off. Having
>  set it to a maximum value of 25.5 seconds my disk is now behaving much more
>  reasonable.
>
>  To actually do it I used FreeDOS floppy image burnt on a CD-RW as a bootable
>  image plus wdidle3.exe in the filesystem itself.
>
>  BTW, WD's tech support has gone silent so chances for an easier solution are
>  not so great.

Any chance you could make your iso available for the freedos w/
wdidle3.exe bootable cd?

I can't track down wdidle3.exe on wdc.com; they have "Data Lifeguard"
and such but I have no idea if the wdidle3.exe is buried in those
downloads.

thanks,
Mike