Acer Aspire One D250 disk spin-down problem

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 16 Jan 2011, Matthias Apitz wrote:

> El d??a Sunday, January 16, 2011 a las 10:05:39AM +0000, Bruce Cran escribi??:
>
>> On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 08:24:13 +0100
>> Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de> wrote:
>>
>>>     Master:  ad4 <WDC WD2500BEVT-22ZCT0/11.01A11> SATA revision 2.x
>>
>>> As well the BIOS has no visible option for this. I want to disable
>>> this, what could I do?
>>
>> Since it's a WDC disk I guess it's one of the "green" ones. These have
>> a short default timeout after which they park the heads. I think you'd
>> need to run the wdidle3.exe application to disable the internal timer,
>
> Thanks, but wdidle3.exe is no option because the laptop does not know
> any Win* partition anymore :-)

It's actually a DOS application and can even be run from a DOS-formatted 
syslinux memdisk.  Not all WD drives can be adjusted with it.  A 500G 
BEVT drive says it changed, but still seems to have an 8-second timeout.