It has come to my attention recently that my hard drive is never spinning down. I double checked my hdparm setup and all was well, so I started using hdparm to try and induce standby or sleep. While it would say it was sending the message, and a check of it's status would confirm it's state, the drive itself would never actually spin down and kmsg would have some random errors logged. To prove that it isn't a hardware issue or hdparm bug, I tested hdparm under both Knoppix and Mandrake and everything worked fine. I even compiled a few different version and all had the same results.

Sadly, I really need hdparm to work under my current system. It is an LFS build using the 2.6.7 kernal and the reiser file system. Sadly (and while much needed), compiling a new kernal is out of the question for my application. So I guess my question is, what might be causing this? Are there any dependancies for hdparm that might not be included in my build?

1. Are you using "hdparm -S(value) /dev/xxx" to spin the drive down?
2. If you are using the above line, check if the kernel acesses swapspace on the disk. You can this out by using "top" on console.

Normally, yes I am using -S. However for testing have been using -y for standby, -Y for sleep, and -C to check the status of the drive. That, holding my ear up to it to listen, and doing an 'ls' to see how long it takes. But no, the system does not use swapspace.