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I have an Asus EEE 1015PX netbook. It runs Linux (debian) without any powersavings enabled. E.g. no harddisk idle/spin-down tooling is running. Now constantly the harddisk spins down after it has been idle for half a minute or so. I can disable this with hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda but this only works up to the next reboot. I tried using hdparm -K 1 /dev/sda to make this setting permanent but this gives an input/output error. This seems to be an issue with other EEE systems as well: my mother has an EEE Shell (a pink one) running windows 7 and that one has a down-spinning drive as well.

My question now is: how can I make it stop doing this? It makes the system very unresponsive and opening terminal/su to root/hdparm/exit shell every time I reboot the laptop (or had it suspend for a while by closing the lid) is annoying as hell.

sr_
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Folkert van Heusden
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2 Answers2

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my recipe, I guess found on the internet, which I have followed with success on eee-netbook, says

  1. make a file named 99-hdd-spin-fix.sh. The important thing is starting with '99'.

  2. make sure the file contains the following 2 lines:

    #!/bin/sh
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda

  3. copy this file to 3 locations:

    /etc/acpi/start.d/
/etc/acpi/suspend.d/
/etc/acpi/resume.d/
    • not sure about necessity of the last two, but the following is a must:

    /etc/pm/sleep.d/

    • and of course the shell-scripts must be made executable. To put them out where one normally not can go, do sudo nautilus in a shell.
Archemar
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bjc
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As this bug report indicates, there is a /etc/default/hdparm file in Debian's hdparm package, you should have a look at this... there might (I'm not sure, sorry, no Debian system at hand right now) be a /etc/hdparm.conf, too, which should be used to set these parameters at init time.

sr_
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  • This unfortunately does not work: I closed the lid so that it goes into stand-by. Then I started it again and verified with hdparm -B /dev/sda that the value is 254 instead of the 255 I configured in /etc/default/hdparm. On the other hand, I found: http://www.jzab.de/content/ultimate-boot-cd-wdidle3-util-included which I'm going to give a try. Will probably help for my mother's asus with windows 7 as well. – Folkert van Heusden Apr 24 '12 at 12:37