I have a dual boot x86 system, with two hard drives. The first, hda is 120 gb, then second is 300gb. Basically, I have kubuntu installed on hda, and SUSE on hdb. However there is a common swap file on hda.

When I boot to SUSE, the hda drive seems to spin down for no reason. Then, as I operate within SUSE, something will trigger and I will hear that drive spin up (of course there is a 5 sec delay or so while it does.). Its hard to figure, because Im hardly ever utilizing my main memory, so why I would be hitting the swap partition on hda is beyond me.

In any case, it seems that the YAST tools only allow you to modify the drive that SUSE is on (in this case hdb), but not other drives. So, I suspect somewhere the hda drive is being told to power down after some length of time.

Is there something I can do to check those parameters and reset that drive to always stay spinning like my second drive?

Thanks for your help in advance

Kork

If this is being set via a hard disk built in feature you can disable it using the hdparm utility.
Look up the man page for hdparm. You may just want to set the parameter to a longer value.

You can make a file with the hdparm -S 0 command and call it during system startup. If using hdparm works for you then putting it in the system startup as the last startup script to run should work. Give it a name like S99hdparm.