I recently purchased an external Maxtor hard drive.
After a while it automatically goes into standby mode and a large light on the front blinks rather annoyingly and I have to re-mount it manually.
Is there a way to stop it from going into standby mode?

Thanks.

Anybody?........... I tried hdparm but all I get are errors.

Is this an USB drive? If so, no wonder hdparm quits, because AFAIK it works on the IDE-bus. But "man hdparm" .

Is there useable information when issueing "lsusb"?

Do you use the smart(cntrl) suite? (If not google for smart or go to sourceforge ... ) I don't remember but that might be able to do something.

Best bet is probably Maxtor as they have some free tools for their hardware. Go to their site (now Seagate?) and look for those, they should be able to control spin down behaviour.

Please come back and post your results.

I think in this instance you want sdparm, rather than hdparm. There's a thread/tutorial here at LQ somewhere on how to modify standby times on external disks using this utility, but I can't find it right now.

When I try hdparm it gives some kind of error and when I try sdparm I get nothing as if the command does not exist either as user or root.

Sounds like the Seagate Freeagent problem - a quicK search should find you the answer.

I looked into that but my HD is a maxtor and the freeagent thing is a kind of HD. Mine is a Maxtor one touch.

Have you installed sdparm? It's not inlucded in a default install of Slackware, so you'll have to add it yourself.

http://sg.torque.net/sg/sdparm.html

I just installed it using gnashley's src2pkg in about 2 minutes, and it seems to be working ok.