>What is the approved method of turning off the ide/ata disk spindown
>via atactl?  I've had the following in my /etc/apm/line file for a
>while, but it appears my disk still spins down every ~10 minutes or so
>only to spin up again within a few seconds.
>
>	atactl wd0 setidle 0
>
>Should I be setting the idle time to some very large number instead?

That definately does it for me.  Is it possible that your laptop BIOS
is sending spindown messages to your hard drive when it "thinks" your
machine is idle?  Does turning off power management in the BIOS help
at all?

--Ken