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Re: [LUG] Powering down an unmounted HDD

 

John Palmer wrote:
*** WARNING ***
On Tue, 16 Aug 2005, James/DarkCow wrote:
M.Blackmore wrote:
Just out of curiosity, is it possible to power down an unmounted disk on
its own ide channel (with no swap part active on it) and keep it down
until it is wanted again?

One I keep in my desktop for "backing up" the home fileserver critical
files is 'orribly noisy and if I could get it to shut up until I want to
mount it again...
You can even do that while it's mounted, on a shared ide channel!

The command is hdparm (as root of course).
You'll want 'hdparm -y /dev/hda' to put it in standby mode
or 'hdparm -Y /dev/hda' to put it to sleep.
They should (from my experience) come back online when they're wanted.

I was also using a second HDD for backup, probably as M.Blackmore
describes.  I experimented with hdparm -y and -Y and have apparently made
the partition table unreadable ("cannot read sector 0").  I think my
mistake was either (1) to give the command hdparm -Y to a HDD that was
already in standby state or (2) to give hdparm -Y to a HDD that didn't
support the sleep state (made c.1998).  Not sure which, but rather
bothered by not being able to read my backups.

Any ideas on recovery would be welcome.
Thanks, John

Sorry that happened to you, but it's always worked fine for me. Anyway, you'll probably want to check out this thread on linuxquestions.org for some pointers: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?threadid=348873

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