>Since *we told* the hard disk to spin down, the fact that it's not ready the
>next time we issue it a command shouldn't be an error.  Certainly, it should
>not cause the DMA/PIO modes to be adjusted.  It seems to me we either need
>to explicitly tell the drive to spin up, or if we can't do that, ignore the
>fact that it's not ready so long as the first command we hand it after we
>spin it down completes successfully within a reasonable timeout, where
>"reasonable" takes into account that the drive had to spin up first.

Remember that right now, the way it's done is a hack (the driver doesn't
know that it's spun down).  But it's not clear from the documentation
that you should really be using "setstandby" instead of "setidle"
(because not all drives support setidle, and some behave weirdly).

Hubert, does changing that to setstandby help you out?

--Ken