Ken Hornstein writes:
> 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?

That was one of my fears too, that the bios was being a bit too
"helpful".

The sony 505tx's BIOS (phoenix) doesn't have a global "turn this bios
apm crap off" switch.  It only has individual "power manage the disk"
/ "don't power manage the disk" switches.  That switch along with
everthing but the auto-lcd-dimming on idle is off.

Now that I know is should work with a "0", let me see if there is a
difference between a virgin startup (with an uninitialized disk timer)
and one where I have run "atactl wd0 setidle 0".

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang Rupprecht    <wolfgang@wsrcc.com>     http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
DGPS signals via the Internet  http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/gps/dgps-ip.html