On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 11:57 PM, Chris Down <chris@chrisdown.name> wrote:
On 15 March 2013 05:56, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@alice-dsl.net> wrote:
yes, if I stay in the BIOS configuration the drive spins down and keeps sleeping.
I'm more curious about the installer (or a bare bones Arch install) than sitting in the BIOS. That makes it easier to differentiate Xfce problems from problems in base packages or the kernel itself.
I tested it with a very old Suse, GNOME 2 and with Ubuntu Quantal, Xfce 4, there I get the same issue as for Arch, it spins down and up and down and up ...
Both of these environments have a lot of daemons/etc running that may wish to periodically probe drives in a way that causes it to spin up for whatever reason.
Best,
Chris
You can also try to add to the kernel boot command the parameter `break=premount`. It will break very early in the booting process, so you can check if it is the kernel itself who probes the disk. Rodrigo.