HD spins down repeatedly

[iammystified]

Hi all,

I'm really hoping someone can help me out here, as I've had no luck elsewhere. Just got a new notebook (Gateway 450 series). I'm generally pretty good at nutting out glitches, but this one has got me.

My problem is this: The HD keeps spinning down after very (VERY) short periods of idle time -- on the order of 5 seconds, maybe 10. Then of course it has to spin up again, which gets a very annoying when I'm doing anything, since every time I save to disk (which I do continually out of paranoia) or do much anything else there is a pause in the action as the drive spins up.

I'm running XP Pro. I checked the only two obvious things I could: Power management settings (under control panel) and BIOS. Neither was helpful.

If you have any ideas I'd be extremely grateful. I'd have to guess that the idle time of a drive can be set (or is completely determined) by software. But I really don't know anything technical about IDE drive states etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
John

 

[CMooreJr]

well....hmmm..the 5 to 10 seconds got me.....check under Control Panel/Display/Screen Saver and click on the "Power" button at the bottom...make sure "Turn off hard drives" is set to NEVER....same with System Standby" and "System Hibernates"...

Hope this helps.

CMoore

 

[iammystified]

Yep.. that was the first thing I checked. Set all power management to "never". So it's some ACPI thing going on behind the scenes, and I don't know how to control it...

Arrghh. Incredibly frustrating. Gateway tech support was laughable, at best. They did give me quite detailed instructions on how to get into the BIOS screen on these "fast new computers". It's difficult because the screen "flashes by so quickly" on bootup. They also told me it is normal for drives to stop with no activity... even after only 10 seconds. A little hard on the motor, I'd say.

 

[mattjurado]

Doesn't sound like software or power management, sounds like a bad drive, or that's just how they made it. I'd call them back, explain the problem to a supervisor at customer service, and tell them that if it isn't fixable (and I doubt it is), you can't use it. Get your money back.

Matt J.