LinuxQuestions.org - loggers are ruining hard drive standby... help

i'm trying to put my hard drive standby(standby spins it down, right?) with "hdparm -y /dev/hda" but whevever i do that, it always goes back to being "active/idle" very quickly. i've been told that this is because of logger daemons that are writing logs on the disk. and it's true, if i boot using, knoppix, i can spin hda down and everything's fine(probably because nothings writing to it, because it's not even mounted in knoppix).

the problem i have is that on my real linux install, i've killed all the daemons i can and something is still waking the disk up. some of the friggin things wont die either, even with kill -9, so it's making it hard to troubleshoot this with trial and error. here's my process list:

Quote:

root@darkstar:~# ps -A
PID TTY TIME CMD
1 ? 00:00:00 init
2 ? 00:00:00 ksoftirqd/0
3 ? 00:00:00 events/0
4 ? 00:00:00 khelper
5 ? 00:00:00 kthread
7 ? 00:00:00 kacpid
94 ? 00:00:00 kblockd/0
139 ? 00:00:00 pdflush
140 ? 00:00:00 pdflush
142 ? 00:00:00 aio/0
141 ? 00:00:00 kswapd0
143 ? 00:00:00 jfsIO
144 ? 00:00:00 jfsCommit
145 ? 00:00:00 jfsSync
737 ? 00:00:00 kseriod
803 ? 00:00:00 reiserfs/0
852 ? 00:00:00 udevd
1222 ? 00:00:00 syslogd
1225 ? 00:00:00 klogd
1258 ? 00:00:00 pccardd
1445 ? 00:00:00 ipw2200/0
1607 ? 00:00:00 khpsbpkt
1647 ? 00:00:00 knodemgrd_0
1807 ? 00:00:00 khubd
4153 ? 00:00:00 crond
4155 ? 00:00:00 atd
4158 ? 00:00:00 acpid
4208 ? 00:00:00 gpm
4210 tty1 00:00:00 bash
4211 tty2 00:00:00 agetty
4212 tty3 00:00:00 agetty
4213 tty4 00:00:00 agetty
4214 tty5 00:00:00 agetty
4215 tty6 00:00:00 agetty
4298 tty1 00:00:00 startx
4310 tty1 00:00:00 xinit
4311 ? 00:00:10 X
4331 tty1 00:00:00 fluxbox
4335 ? 00:00:00 xsnow
4336 ? 00:00:00 firefox
4357 ? 00:00:00 run-mozilla.sh
4362 ? 00:00:09 firefox-bin
4408 ? 00:00:00 dhcpcd
4411 ? 00:00:00 netstat <defunct>
4437 ? 00:00:00 rxvt
4438 pts/0 00:00:00 bash
4456 pts/0 00:00:00 ps

if somebody can tell me what i need to kill in order for my drive to stay spun down until i wake it up, i'd appreciate it.