i have a standard ata drive(i'm not sure of the manufacturer) with an ich4m ide controller.

when i try to put it in standby with "hdparm -y /dev/hda" it goes into standby and immediately wakes up. I've tried killing syslogd and other processes that may be writing to the drive, but i dunno what programs are writing to the drive and which arent and i cant kill all of them. is this happening just because some process is writing to the drive or could it be something else?

when i try to put it to sleep with "hdparm -Y /dev/hda" everthing hangs: my shell stops responding, the whole system seems to just stop, i cant even reboot with ctrl alt del. if anybody can help me fix this, i'd appreciate it.

hmm, I wonder why..........man hdparm says this.............
OH, I guess that explains it!

i read that too, but doesnt that just mean that my driver would issue a hard or soft reset to the drive the next time it needs to be accessed? so if i put it into deep sleep, then do something that needs to access the hard drive like ls or something, shouldnt it come out of sleep? what does that mean by hard or soft reset? shuting down the system or just reseting the drive? sometimes i can use "hdparm -w /dev/hda" and it will reset and work after it's been in sleep. i also have problems with my hard drive when resuming from acpi s3, probably because it puts the drive into a similar, if not the same, sleep state.

bump