Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?

On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:15:44 +0000, Arno Wagner wrote:
Still, basically the BIOS manufacurers or customizers messed
up badly here.

Yeah, seems like it :-( I still haven't found any BIOS that actually
supports spinning up a SATA disk.

And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the
utility by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, which he helpfully pointed out to me:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm

Dan

"Daniel Lenski" wrote in message et
On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:15:44 +0000, Arno Wagner wrote:
Still, basically the BIOS manufacurers or customizers messed
up badly here.

Yeah, seems like it :-( I still haven't found any BIOS that actually
supports spinning up a SATA disk.

And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the
utility by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, which he helpfully pointed out to me:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm

He did? I must have missed that.


Dan

"Arno Wagner" wrote in message
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Dan Lenski wrote:
[...]
I'd also like to poke the freakin' BIOS vendors with a clue stick and
tell them to support this feature... but that's probably a lost cause,
right?

Very likely. These people believe they know what they are doing, which
is the worst kind of incompetence.

So that's where you are coming from, babblebot.


Arno

"Maxim S. Shatskih" wrote in message
The whole thing is kind of amazing: toggling the "power up in standby"
feature caused the BIOS of *three* desktop computers to pronounce the
drive dead, and to freeze when booting.

A clear sign of bad industry support of this (S)ATA feature, especially
for laptop drives.

For SCSI drives, their SCSI BIOSes can send START STOP UNIT (the
similar SCSI command) at boot for very long times, and the drive can be
mechanically jumpered to "no spin at powerup".

This is because spinning up a SCSI drive imposes significant load to the PSU,
so, it is a good idea to delay its spinup until after the BIOS self-tests,

That is utter nonsense.

while the (S)ATA drives will be spinned up and power up. This reduces the PSU
power load.

Like there is any difference with sata drives spinning up.


But this is relevant for "heavy" SCSI drives only,

Utterly clueless.

not relevant for a laptop drive.

That's why - IMHO - the industry support for a feature is bad on (S)ATA.

Waffle.


* why isn't this feature marked as DANGEROUS in the hdparm
manual :-) ?

Hey, it's open source, mark yourself and tell the maintainer :-)

* is there a way to issue raw commands to a drive from Linux (maybe
via /sys) without recompiling the kernel?

Try FreeBSD and "camcontrol".

On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:05:03 +0200, Folkert Rienstra wrote:
And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the
utility by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, which he helpfully pointed out to me:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm

He did? I must have missed that.

Yeah, I accidentally hit "reply via email" to him, and he replied in
kind. I'm still getting the hang of this here newsreader thingy

Dan

On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 22:22:32 +0000, Daniel Lenski wrote:

On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:15:44 +0000, Arno Wagner wrote:
Still, basically the BIOS manufacurers or customizers messed
up badly here.

Yeah, seems like it :-( I still haven't found any BIOS that actually
supports spinning up a SATA disk.

And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the
utility by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, which he helpfully pointed out to me:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm


Okay, to wrap things up: there *is* a utility, in the form of a boot
floppy or CD, which can turn off "power-up in standby mode" for any
PATA/SATA drive. It was helpfully released by Mark Lord who wrote the
Linux kernel patch--as well as hdparm itself--and can be found on
sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...roup_id=136732

Dan

"Daniel Lenski" wrote in message et
On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:15:44 +0000, Arno Wagner wrote:
Still, basically the BIOS manufacurers or customizers messed
up badly here.

Yeah, seems like it :-(

I still haven't found any BIOS that actu-
ally supports spinning up a SATA disk.

But you did for PATA?

And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the utility
by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen,

Works fine for SATA too, except maybe that the SATA controller should
support ATA compatability mode (support M/S) for Findpart to work. That is if Findpart actually uses PM, PS, SM and SS and isn't
translating
that to BIOS device numbers anyway in which case it doesn't matter.

which he helpfully pointed out to me:

You mean, I did that, don't you?

http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm

Dan

"Dan Lenski" wrote in message et
On Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:05:03 +0200, Folkert Rienstra wrote:
And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the
utility by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, which he helpfully pointed out to me:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm

He did? I must have missed that.

Yeah, I accidentally hit "reply via email" to him, and he replied in kind.

Uhuh. And obviously he replied long before I gave you that re-
ference, making my effort finding it for you totally worthless.

I'm still getting the hang of this here newsreader thingy

No kidding.


Dan

On Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:16:28 +0200, Folkert Rienstra wrote:
Uhuh. And obviously he replied long before I gave you that re-
ference, making my effort finding it for you totally worthless.

Sorry about that. But the other info you've been provided has been very
helpful, and hopefully others with the same problem with come across this
thread.

I'm still getting the hang of this here newsreader thingy

No kidding.

Ouch!

Dan

Hitachi provides some tools for hard disks made by Hitachi. The link
for download is

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Hsing

On Jun 5, 12:09 pm, Daniel Lenski wrote:
On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 22:22:32 +0000, Daniel Lenski wrote:
On Sat, 02 Jun 2007 22:15:44 +0000, Arno Wagner wrote:
Still, basically the BIOS manufacurers or customizers messed
up badly here.

Yeah, seems like it :-( I still haven't found any BIOS that actually
supports spinning up a SATA disk.

And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the
utility by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, which he helpfully pointed out to me:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm

Okay, to wrap things up: there *is* a utility, in the form of a boot
floppy or CD, which can turn off "power-up in standby mode" for any
PATA/SATA drive. It was helpfully released by Mark Lord who wrote the
Linux kernel patch--as well as hdparm itself--and can be found on
sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...roup_id=136732

Dan