I'm running ubuntu-server 8.04 on an old pentium 3. It has a flash card for the operating system and a hard drive for NAS and bulky stuff. I want to spin down the hard drive when it's idle, but hdparm doesn't seem to do it.

I think I remember a line about it disabling ACPI due to the MB age when it was booting.
I assume I need ACPI to make it work. How do I (a) know if it is available on my hardware; and (b) turn it on in the kernel?
The drive is newish, so it will work.
I'm confident there is no regular disk activity on that drive.

thanks.

Since ACPI was auto-disabled by the OS, most likely it won't work, and you'd break more than you fix by forcing the issue. Quite frankly, the HDD will suffer a head crash or fried controller board long before the platter motor or bearings wear out.

FWIW- I'm running Kubuntu on a PIII. The only way to 'spin-down' the HDD was to suspend the entire system, and then it wouldn't wake-I had to do a hard-reset.

ok. The thing lives under my bed at present, so my concern was more noise than longevity. But then, it's not a loud drive, I can live with it.

Thanks.