How to prevent HDD spin-down in XP Pro?

[mrkvo$oft]

I installed XP Pro on Acer Aspire1 AOD250, + all drivers from Acer website and now the HDD spins down after 5-10 seconds of inactivity and then spins back up after few seconds since XP keeps accesing the drive in the background all the time. Then again spin down in like 5-10 seconds of idle and the process repeats.

I dual-boot with Ubuntu, under which there is no problem with the disk.

I used free HD Tune 2.55 but it shows me no info except the temperature, and while on hd tune's website I found Drive power manager. Tried it, and I can prevent the disk to go to stanby - spindown. All is great until system restart and the problem is back. So it seems that windows keeps changing the HDD power management on boot-up and I have to use the Drive power manager every time as workaround.

Is there any other way to manage HDD power management in XP. Registry keys maybe?

The drive is WD3200BEKT.

[GrofLuigi]

Here are my experiences.

QuietHDD works best for me.

GL

[mrkvo$oft]

Thank you, QuietHDD at least can run automatically.

[fdv]

The problem is that you installed on a notebook, and XP saw this during the install, so it installed the power saving kernel. There are four:

ntoskrnl.exe (laptop systems get this)

ntkrnlpa.exe (desktop systems get this)

ntkrnlmp.exe (legacy/older systems)

ntkrpamp.exe (legacy/older systems)

I have to apologize as I swapped the kernel in my notebook but I can barely remember how (I had the same problem as you did on my IBM ThinkPad).

There is a settings somewhere... Try:

Right click on My Computer

Properties

Hardware

Device Manager

Double click "Computer" at the top

You will see some descriptor. Mine says "ACPI Multiprocessor PC" meaning desktop system.

If you go to System Devices, there is an item that you have to uninstall to make XP think that it's a desktop computer. Again, I am sorry but I cannot recall exactly.

After you do it, you system will reinstall everything on next boot one device at a time and it will take FOREVER. After that, XP thinks that there is no power saving feature on the computer and it will stop powering devices down.

At least you have a start to go Googling

[GrofLuigi]

@fdv,

I don't think that is the issue here. I can speak only for myself, but the clicking happens even in DOS. Somewhere in the links I posted (or maybe when I was Googeling ) it was said that newer HDDs (maybe only 2,5 inch ones?) come with this value (minutes until spindown) greatly reduced by default, as opposed to earlier generations. So it's a 'feature' of the HDD firmware, or, rather, its default values.

Otherwise, it could be solved by setting the power scheme to "Always On".

GL