[SPARCbook] more fun with hard drives... (power-saving woes)

[William M. Perry]

arno uhlmelmahei <arno at panix.com> writes:

> "William M. Perry" wrote:
> > 
> > Well, I finally got the 6.4GB Toshiba in the sparcboo 3gx, but it seems
> > that every time the sparcbook goes into power-saving mode and spins it
> > down, it refuses to spin back up.  Errors trying to access anything on the
> > /usr partition (I'm currently still booting off of an external drive, and
> > mounting /opt and /usr off of the internal drive).
> > 
> > I seem to have fixed the problem by modifying /etc/power.conf to never
> > power-manage the sd at 3,0 device, but this isn't really optimal.  Anybody run
> > into this with their upgraded hard-drives?
>   
> What exactly is `power-saving' mode?  Are you running 2.5.1 or 2.6? My
> box suspends when i close the cover, but as far as spinning down the
> drive, I've yet to see it happen.

Well, it tries to do something.  :) This is with solaris 2.6 (installed
from the Tadpole CDROM) with no patches applied.  The default
/etc/power.conf and /etc/battery.pwrcf attempt to power-manage sd at 3,0 after
30 minutes of inactivity.

Basically, if I stopped working on the laptop for more than 35 minutes or
so (either on the main desktop, or playing downstairs with my son), the
laptop would have the screen blanked... the screen would come back just
fine, but nothing on /usr or /opt would be accessible.  The drive didn't
even feel like it was spinning up.

'format' at this point could not even detect what type of disk it was... it 
asked me to choose a geometry, etc.  The external drive and the floppy
worked just fine.

Changing /etc/power.conf and /etc/battery.pwrcf to use '-1' as the
power-timeout for the drive seems to have fixed it.  Perhaps your sparcbook 
isn't 'idle enough' to ever really hit ps-mode on the hd?  I don't run a
whole lot in the background on this... most of the time it is just serving
my mail and elisp up via NFS, and if one of my other machines isn't doing
anything over NFS, it's _very_ idle.

-Bill P.