Re: Waiting for disks to spin up

On Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:34:50 +0000
Julian Coleman <[email protected]> wrote:

> When I reboot my DS207 (but not when powering on), it seems that the disks
> spin down and spin up again one after the other.  This causes altboot (and
> sometimes NetBSD) to only detect the first disk. A work round for this is
> to add a delay when checking for disks, as per the attached patch.
> However, I wondered if there was a better way to do this.

Yes, there is a better way! :)

Tohru Nishimura had the great idea to check the power state of the
drive (CHKPWR ATA command, returns active, idle or standby).

On ftp.NetBSD.org, in pub/NetBSD/misc/phx/sandpoint you will find
the archive altboot19beta.tar.gz, which contains a modified version
of altboot.bin and altboot.img. It checks the power state, wakes up
the drive, and waits until it is ready again.

It works fine for me. Please test and tell me if it works for you.

-- 
Frank Wille