Disable hard drive permenantly?

[infernosoft]

All I want my laptop to do for as long as it can, is to play a movie........THAT'S IT.

So, since I'm running off of battery life only, I want to take as many precautions as possible to increase the life of my battery.

How can I place my internal HD into standby?
How can I keep it in standby PERMANENTLY (meaning, no other programs can bring it back up), until i manually bring it back up.

NOTE - I've loaded the movie into my RAM, so HD usage is not needed.

Thanks, and please respond fast b/c i'm leaving for my trip in less than 2 days.

[glennzo]

See man hdparm.
-S Put the drive into idle (low-power) mode, and also set the standby (spindown)
timeout for the drive. This timeout value is used by the drive to determine how
long to wait (with no disk activity) before turning off the spindle motor to
save power. Under such circumstances, the drive may take as long as 30 seconds
to respond to a subsequent disk access, though most drives are much quicker.
The encoding of the timeout value is somewhat peculiar. A value of zero means
"timeouts are disabled": the device will not automatically enter standby mode.
Values from 1 to 240 specify multiples of 5 seconds, yielding timeouts from 5
seconds to 20 minutes. Values from 241 to 251 specify from 1 to 11 units of 30
minutes, yielding timeouts from 30 minutes to 5.5 hours. A value of 252 signi-
fies a timeout of 21 minutes. A value of 253 sets a vendor-defined timeout
period between 8 and 12 hours, and the value 254 is reserved. 255 is inter-
preted as 21 minutes plus 15 seconds. Note that some older drives may have very
different interpretations of these values.

You're on your own with this. Just pointing out the hdparm option.

[infernosoft]

I tried "hdparm -S /dev/sda2" and nothing too noticable happened. Do I want a large or small value. sorry, the man was a little confusing.

I also tried

hdpram -Y /dev/sda2

and i heard the drive stop spinning.....and then, it started back up within 3 seconds.

[glennzo]

I don't generally play with hdparm. Just thought I'd point it out to you as an option for you to achieve your goals with the drive.