[arch-general] Western Digital external drives

[Rodrigo Rivas]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 11:57 PM, Chris Down <chris at chrisdown.name> wrote:

> On 15 March 2013 05:56, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at 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.