G'day all, I ask this here as I know there are a few who've used these little wonder boxes.
This machine has a laptop hard disk in it. One feature of laptop hard disks is they can be asked to auto-park the head after x seconds of idle time. This is all well and good on a laptop as it often prevents moving and bumping trashing the drive. Randomly, anywhere from 2-6 days of uptime, something makes the drive in this mac mini select this mode, and it unloads the heads after about 5 seconds of idle time. Due to the behaviour of the OS, this means it loads and unloads the heads on about a 10-30 second cycle continuously. As you can imagine, a mechanical device has a specified life cycle, and at this rate I'll trash the drive within a year. The only way I can seem to stop this from happening is to power off the machine for 30 seconds and then re-boot. Booting into MacOS or any other form of reboot just sees it keep happening. I've tried all the hdparm settings I can find to prevent this, or stop it once it's started but I'm just at a total loss as to why its occuring. After a cold boot it is great for a couple of days, then it starts up again.. Oh, it's running Ubuntu 7.04 with a stock Ubuntu kernel. Anyone, anyone, Bueller, Bueller, Fry ? Brad -- "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams
