Failure of brand new drive... possibly due to staggered spinup?

[Daniel Lenski]

Still, basically the BIOS manufacurers or customizers messed
up badly here.

Yeah, seems like it :-( I still haven't found any BIOS that actually
supports spinning up a SATA disk.

And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the
utility by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, which he helpfully pointed out to me:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm

Dan

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Yeah, seems like it :-( I still haven't found any BIOS that actually
supports spinning up a SATA disk.

And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the
utility by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, which he helpfully pointed out to me:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm

He did? I must have missed that.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Very likely. These people believe they know what they are doing, which
is the worst kind of incompetence.

So that's where you are coming from, babblebot.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

A clear sign of bad industry support of this (S)ATA feature, especially
for laptop drives.

For SCSI drives, their SCSI BIOSes can send START STOP UNIT (the
similar SCSI command) at boot for very long times, and the drive can be
mechanically jumpered to "no spin at powerup".

This is because spinning up a SCSI drive imposes significant load to the PSU,
so, it is a good idea to delay its spinup until after the BIOS self-tests,

That is utter nonsense.

while the (S)ATA drives will be spinned up and power up. This reduces the PSU
power load.

Like there is any difference with sata drives spinning up.

But this is relevant for "heavy" SCSI drives only,

Utterly clueless.

 

[Dan Lenski]

He did? I must have missed that.

Yeah, I accidentally hit "reply via email" to him, and he replied in
kind. I'm still getting the hang of this here newsreader thingy

Dan

 

[Daniel Lenski]

Yeah, seems like it :-( I still haven't found any BIOS that actually
supports spinning up a SATA disk.

And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the
utility by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen, which he helpfully pointed out to me:
http://www.partitionsupport.com/advancednotes.htm

Okay, to wrap things up: there *is* a utility, in the form of a boot
floppy or CD, which can turn off "power-up in standby mode" for any
PATA/SATA drive. It was helpfully released by Mark Lord who wrote the
Linux kernel patch--as well as hdparm itself--and can be found on
sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=136732

Dan

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Yeah, seems like it :-(

I still haven't found any BIOS that actu-
ally supports spinning up a SATA disk.

But you did for PATA?

And for a PATA disk, the only easy way to rescue it is with the utility
by Svend Olaf Mikkelsen,

Works fine for SATA too, except maybe that the SATA controller should
support ATA compatability mode (support M/S) for Findpart to work. That is if Findpart actually uses PM, PS, SM and SS and isn't
translating
that to BIOS device numbers anyway in which case it doesn't matter.

which he helpfully pointed out to me:

You mean, I did that, don't you?

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Yeah, I accidentally hit "reply via email" to him, and he replied in kind.

Uhuh. And obviously he replied long before I gave you that re-
ference, making my effort finding it for you totally worthless.

I'm still getting the hang of this here newsreader thingy

No kidding.

 

[Daniel Lenski]

Uhuh. And obviously he replied long before I gave you that re-
ference, making my effort finding it for you totally worthless.

Sorry about that. But the other info you've been provided has been very
helpful, and hopefully others with the same problem with come across this
thread.

No kidding.

Ouch!

Dan

 

[hsing]

Hitachi provides some tools for hard disks made by Hitachi. The link
for download is

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Hsing

 

[Ales Dvorak]

Hi,

I have similar problem with two Western Digital WD3200KD SATA drives
and "power up in standby" propety set. I've attached disks to the
Highpoint RocketRAID 2320 and in the card setup utility turnded the
Staggered Spinup On. While inicialized by the card, they spin up and
detect correctly by the card bios, but in system (WinSrv2k3, Ubuntu)
are not visible. Disabling Staggered spinup in card's bios utility
makes no effect and I found no other way to disable it.
I've tryed Mark Lord's bootable CD and made few tests:
(disks were now attached to Silicon Image 3114 controller)
Test 1:
- start PC, Mark's CD spins up disks, reset PC, boot to Windows - disk
were detected correctly and work fine

Test 2:
- start PC, Mark's CD spins up disks, reset PC, boot to Ubuntu
2.6.20.16 - disk were detected correctly and work fine but hdparm -s0
doesn't work (probably because of missing patch in kernel):
hdparm -s0 /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
spin-up: setting power-up in standby to 0 (off)
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(powerup_in_standby) failed: Input/output error

Test 3:
- start PC, boot to Ubuntu 2.6.22.rc4 - disks are spinned up by kernel
but not identified (no /dev/sdx) so I can't even try hdparm

Now I don't understand it at all ...

Last chance was "findpart feature" from dos but only primary/secondary
master/slave IDE can be addressed. So no chance for SATA (?).

Anyone have an idea what else should I try to disable the power up in
standby? I've been testing it last four days with no success.

Thanx
Ales Dvorak

 

[hkbakke]

Exact same problem:
4xWD3200KS drives gone using staggered spinup on the Highpoint 2320.
The disks work as long as they are connected to the 2320 controller
and using the controller drivers in XP. But FreeNAS doesn't recognize
them anymore.

I can make them spin up on my mainboards controller using the linux
disk, but it fails to disable the feature.

I have filed a question with WD support, hoping they can help me. I
think it should be solvable by software or maybe a firmware reset/
update of some kind.

 

[Hans-Kristian]

Exact same problem:
4xWD3200KS drives gone using staggered spinup on the Highpoint 2320.
The disks work as long as they are connected to the 2320 controller
and using the controller drivers in XP. But FreeNAS doesn't recognize
them anymore.

I can make them spin up on my mainboards controller using the linux
disk, but it fails to disable the feature.

I have filed a question with WD support, hoping they can help me. I
think it should be solvable by software or maybe a firmware reset/
update of some kind.