Eric, > Of course DOS will freeze for a short moment when it has to > wait for a harddisk to spin up again, but as I never had a > bigger problem than that with power-saving in DOS without > UIDE, I would like to suggest the opposite of what the UIDE > readme.txt seems to say at the moment: > > Could UIDE be used to configure the power saving timeout of > your harddisks? The involved IDE/ATA commands are relatively > simple. They could be sent to either all disks which, based > on their self-ID, support power saving, or to one selected > disk, using any suitable command line syntax for the latter. > > Of course UIDE should in addition be able to wait in a safe > way when it encounters a sleeping disk which has to spin up > first. Should be possible with small error handling > changes ...
The problem is "WHERE" does UIDE or any other driver wait for a sleeping, i.e. "stand-by" hard disk to awaken again?? The ATA specs do not make this clear. Can UIDE simply issue a drive-select command to the disk and await "ready" for it? Or, does UIDE actually have to issue a "seek" or "read", and then retry that command when first it fails?? If you can determine a reliable way for ALL disks to "come out of stand-by" mode, i.e. at what point UIDE should have a long time-out value, I can program that. But, it must be COMMON to all drives, NO exceptions, or it might cause just as much TROUBLE as it resolves! Jack R. Ellis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Achieve unprecedented app performance and reliability What every C/C++ and Fortran developer should know. Learn how Intel has extended the reach of its next-generation tools to help boost performance applications - inlcuding clusters. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-dev2devmay _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
