Laptop hard drive spindown timeout

[Peter Radcliffe]

Nate Clark <nwc at jope.net> probably said:
> I'm surprised at how well 5.1-RELEASE is working on my IBM
> Thinkpad 600X, with the exception of one annoying problem.  When I'm
> running from batteries, the hard drive spins down every second or so.  Of
> course this is usually followed by some disk activity requiring it to spin
> up again.  So my drive is in a constant state of spin down/spin up.  All
> I can think of is how much this is shortening the life of my drive.  This
> doesn't happen when on the AC adaptor.  Needless to say, I never run on
> batteries, which kinda defeats the purpose of having a laptop.
> I'm not using APM or ACPI, although my troubleshooting with these enabled
> has had no effect so far.  Any ideas about how to fix this?  I don't mind
> doing a little kernel or device driver hacking if need be. Actually, I'd
> enjoy it, just don't know where to begin.

This is usually a BIOS feature, especially if you're not using ACPI.

There is a program called ps2.exe, which you can get a standalone
floppy version from IBM's driver download pages, which will configure
the BIOS power features and other things. My guess would be that this
can solve your problem ...

P.

-- 
pir