Hello,
I bought an external USB disk, Seagate FreeAgent, and want to use
it with my SUSE 10.0 system. I was not able to locate detailled
technical information about that disk on the Net.
After some time, the disk puts itself in some "sleep" mode.
("sleep" is my term; I have not found infos on that. It's maybe to
save power, or to protect against too much heat; there doesn't seem
to be a fan in this disk case.) When one wants to access the disk
afterwards, Linux complains that the device is not ready, and has
I/O errors on that device. If one waits for four or five seconds,
the disk has spun up and the device can be accessed again without
problems.
I don't know if I can discover if the disk sleeps or not. (Well,
besides getting kernel error messages in syslog when I try to
access it. ;-) When the disk sleeps, lsusb still lists the device
as available.
My problem is now twofold:
-- When that disk goes to sleep while it is mounted, that causes
havroc for the filesystem state. I use XFS -- when XFS sees
the device errors, it places the filesystem in an error state.
-- When the disk is unmounted and sleeps, mount does not work
without problems either. One has to wait until the disk has
started itself again, just then the mount succeeds.
In the end, this means that I can only mount the disk manually, and
that I must take care to unmount it very soon after its use. This
is obviously not what I want, some automatism would be nice.
Therefore:
-- Does anybody know this disk and can tell me more about that
"sleep" mode?
-- Can one tell Linux that it shall wait for some time during
mount (and retry) when it gets a "device not ready" error?
-- Is there some hotplug or HAL magic that one can utilize here?
I used a recipe to turn off automatic mounting in HAL, but I
don't know enough about these systems to see if one could
utilize them in my situation.
Thanks in advance for any answers, or for hints where I could
follow up.
Joachim
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Joachim Schrod Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Roedermark, Germany
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