Harddrive still active at power off

admiralspark · 2011-01-15 05:16:59

Hello everyone,
I'm having an unusual problem with my HP Mini. When I go to shut down the laptop, it will proceed to run through the process with no problems until the end--the harddrive will start to spinup again right after POWER OFF is issued, and it then makes the noise that it would if I was making it force-shutdown by holding the power button. Not good.

I've spent the last two days searching the Wiki, google hits, and forums posts both here and on other forums and I can't find a working solution to the problem. What I think I want to use would be basically the same effect as running this:

hdparm -f /dev/sda
sleep 1
hdparm -y /dev/sda

Which would send the hdd to standby, and then shut it down. I've tried placing those specific lines in certain areas of rc.shutdown (middle and end of file, before and after the "/sbin/poweroff -d -f -h -i" line, which if it was working right should prevent this problem from happening anyway).

The problem is reproduced both with and without laptop mode enabled, and doesn't seem to be affected whether I shutdown from a cli or X.

One thing of note, it doesn't happen if I reboot, only shutdown. I can reboot, pop up to the grub menu and then hit the powerbutton and it shuts down "normal".

Which log files/script files would be useful in diagnosing this?

MadTux · 2011-01-15 17:44:31

Did you already look into
- /var/log/errors.log
- /var/log/messages
- /var/log/user.log

admiralspark · 2011-01-15 20:04:43

Thanks MadTux,
Scanning over the files, no errors are reported, I'm going to assume that the computer is doing exactly what I tell it to, not what I want it to.

Is hdparm the right way to control the hdd? I've heard of sdparm, I might try that, but the problem must be caused by some config file I'm overlooking...

EDIT:
The people at https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=249653 have the exact same issue on an older kernel, and I get the same results when running the commands listed there. They mention a patch which will add a stop_on_shutdown file in the scsi harddrive's folder (for 2.6.22). Since I'm running a special kernel for my laptop (from 2.6.36), I'd rather not recompile it (Atom's suck), though I may do that in the end. I'll post back here if I find a working solution!

Last edited by admiralspark (2011-01-15 21:55:58)

Arch Linux

#1 2011-01-15 05:16:59

Harddrive still active at power off

#2 2011-01-15 17:44:31

Re: Harddrive still active at power off

#3 2011-01-15 20:04:43

Re: Harddrive still active at power off

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