I have a few hard drives run by a linux partition opened by WM Ware as samba share in Windows. I hope that makes sense to you guys.

But the hard drives are always in sleep mode everytime I turn on the computer(I always hibernate) and this leads to programs that depend on them to lock up.

I'm wondering is how I would go about keep them out of sleep mode in a cron script or something. I've looked at hdparm, but it doesn't seem to do what I want to do, and I'd prefer something higher level anyway.

How do you expect the hard drives on a hibernating computer to operate?

You've written the operating system image to disk and turned off the power to the machine.

I'm missing something about your scenario; please go into more detail about what you expect to happen when you "turn on the computer".

It is really strange. If I understood it right, you have SMB server running inside virtual Linux OS installation. OS in the virtual machine is not supposed to have access to physical disk device, but rather to virtual one. It shouldn't be able to manage sleep and wake-up policies at all.

It is difficult to say, but I think you have some problem with settings in the primary OS. My advice is to start by verifying disk policies in primary OS. After that proceed with settings in the VM manager program. I have been using KVM and VirtualBox, but have no VMware experience.

I use hdparm to set the desired timeout for spindown on my nas PC drives.

#! /usr/bin/bash
workdir="$( cd "$( dirname "$0" )" && pwd )"
disklist=`ls /dev/sd* | egrep "/dev/sd[a-z]+$"`
echo $disklist
for disk in $disklist
do
# hdparm -S0 $disk #> /dev/null &
hdparm -S242 $disk #> /dev/null &
# hdparm -S 241 $disk #> /dev/null &
done

S0 means no spindown
S241 meand 'after 30 minutes"
S242 means "after one hour"

Check the hdparm manpage.
Hope this helps. I am not sure it does in your virtualized environment.

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I don't. (The hard drives are physical as is the partition Slackware is installed on. Sorry, if I didn't make that 100% clear. I can boot it up if I so want and use it like a normal Slack install, as opposed to a virtualized environment.) I expect them to spin up when I turn on the computer, but there seems to be something that doesn't tell VM Ware that it's turned back on. So, I'd need something within the Slackware install to keep the drives running all the time, since as far as Slackware knows the PC is on forever.

I'm guessing that the PC turns them off after finishing the hibernate command and shutting down the PC. When I turn it back on, it simply passes on to Windows which naturally does nothing to notify VM Ware to spin up the hard drives.

I'll give hdparm another go. Thanks for the script.

hdparm can brick your hard drive leave it alone

are you in hibernate or suspend

suspend the state of the computer goes in to memory every thing BUT the memory powers down
on resume the state of the computer is reloaded from memory and the computer picks up from where it left off

hibernate saves the state of the computer and the memory is saved to disk and turns every thing off
coming back from hibernate reloads the kernel then when the kernel sees the signature from hibernate it reloads the state of the computer including the contents of ram the computer picks up where it left off

if it's suspend a driver may need to be reloaded like the firmware for a video card

Hi,
Care to elaborate on that statement?

Everyone should read the 'man hdparm' to understand proper options and usage.

I have used 'hdparm' many times and my drives are still functional.

Have fun & enjoy!

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