Re: patch to put IDE drives in sleep-mode after an halt

[idalton@ferret.dyndns.org]

On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 03:16:44PM +0000, Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> On 24 May 01 at 14:59, peter k. wrote:
> 
> > > auto-parking), and since all drives are voice coil drives, then they
> > > should auto-park. But i've had problems with some hard drives that were
> > > spinned down (when Win____ was shutdown)..  if i reset the PC (instead
> > > of turning it off), the hard drives wouldn't come back on so i'd have to
> > > do a full shutdown of the machine.
> > 
> > well, my new 40gb ones are auto-parking i think but all the other ones from
> > last year aren't
> > and older hardware (although 1 year isnt even old for a hd) should be
> > supported by the kernel, right?
> > plus, its really not difficult to implement spinning down the hds before
> > halt anyway and then the kernel
> > leaves the system as clean as it was before booting ;) !!
> 
> I'm using (at the end of /etc/init.d/halt):
> 
> cat /sbin/halt > /dev/null
> cat /bin/sleep > /dev/null
> hdparm -Y /dev/hdd
> hdparm -Y /dev/hdc
> hdparm -Y /dev/hdb
> hdparm -Y /dev/hda
> /bin/sleep 2
> /sbin/halt -d -f -i -p
> 
> It works fine for me for years... I had to put sleep 2 here, as otherwise
> CDROM drive does not park its head correctly (as hdparm /dev/hdc causes
> ide-cd/cdrom to load - and this causes CDROM to spin up :-( )
> So I do not see any reason for doing HDD park by kernel...

I do something similar to this on my non-poweroff machines, except currently
I have only the hard drives coded in. Also, since two of the machines are SCSI,
I have generic built-in so I can spin those down too. (unless hdparm no longer
needs sg loaded to spin down a drive)

Though, having a compile-time or boot-time kernel option to spin down all
attached drives at halt may not be a bad idea.

-- Ferret