To be fair to the Prettiest Killer
So, after all the good I said about the new Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, it turns out that it has been slightly harmful. A Pretty Killer. It has been turning on and off my harddrive very fast while running it. This behaviour ended up making a clicking noise on my shiny new Dell M1530 laptop. For fairness sake I will put that info here, and say that Windows used to do it too, and that there is a way to fix it. I noticed it in January, and thought it would go away with the newest version, which didn’t happen. I actually found out about it at the link above and followed the links to make the fix as well, so it is no longer happening. The details of the fix are behind the link for my own record of what I needed to do.The bug report is here and has been for quite some time.
The workaround is described as:
Here is how I permanently fixed it:
1) make a file named “99-hdd-
2) make sure the file contains the following 2 lines (fix it if you have PATA HDD):
#!/bin/sh
hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda
3) copy this file to 3 locations:
/etc/acpi/
/etc/acpi/resume.d/
/etc/acpi/start.d/
Voila! After that the HDD never spins down on power (looks like it actually spins down on battery at modest rate).
Sorry if the instruction is too detailed, no offense.
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Hey, did you put 8.04 on my computer as well? I was reading your tec stuff and my Dell 1530 also has a clicking sound once in a while. It goes off at random times (not when I’m booting it up or shutting it down). I had no idea why and was trying to monitor what I was doing at the time to see if I could figure out a pattern. I think that this must also be happening on mine… So although you think your instruction is too detailed I might argue that they are not detailed enough. Let me know.