HolyCrap Posted September 21, 2008 Share Posted September 21, 2008 I've just set up a dual boot system with two drives, one is OSX and one is XP. Shortly my system will have FOUR drives, two solely for XP and two solely for OSX. The thing is, when I'm spending days in OSX, it seems like a total waste to have the XP drives working since I'm not using them at all. Is there any way to completley power them down so there is zero wear and tear on those drives? Conversely, is there any way to do this with my OSX drives when I'm running XP? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HolyCrap Posted September 22, 2008 Author Share Posted September 22, 2008 Using hdparm along with devcon in WindowsXP I can set up a batch file which can run as soon as I boot up and will put the OSX drives into suspend or sleep and disable them within Windows so nothing will wake them up. Even though it's not quite the same as pulling out the power plug (because power will still be running to the drive) it's pretty close and definitely keeps the heat levels down and prevents me/anybody from doing anything to the drives accidentally as well as keep the drives from spinning. That takes care of me when I'm in Windows and not running OSX, but not viseversa. I'm still looking for a solution here. I found this thread about taking the windows drives off the desktop, or even unmounting them, http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?sho...mp;#entry244990 but unmounting the volumes doesn't prevent OSX from spinning the XP hard drives back up after they eventually spin down. Starting anything that feels the need to check out my drives will spin them back up which defeats the whole purpose. So, unmounting the volumes could be a start, but I really need to have OSX completely ignore the XP drives themselves, not just unmount the volumes. Anyone? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HolyCrap Posted September 23, 2008 Author Share Posted September 23, 2008 Bump. If there's no software solution on the Mac side, I guess I'm going to buy some eSata enclosures and run the entire system off of removable drives. Any software pointers before I send NewEgg my money? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lsdelirious Posted May 22, 2009 Share Posted May 22, 2009 Still nothing eh? I too would like to find a way to prevent this, as my dual boot system has 4 drives in a RAID 0 array for Vista x64 -OSX recognizes them 4 separate unreadable disks and not 1 ntfs partition, so its not like it could even use it to transfer data to OSX anyways! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacUser2525 Posted May 22, 2009 Share Posted May 22, 2009 Still nothing eh? I too would like to find a way to prevent this, as my dual boot system has 4 drives in a RAID 0 array for Vista x64 -OSX recognizes them 4 separate unreadable disks and not 1 ntfs partition, so its not like it could even use it to transfer data to OSX anyways! Try this /etc/fstab work around. http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-270798.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lsdelirious Posted May 25, 2009 Share Posted May 25, 2009 Try this /etc/fstab work around. http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-270798.html thanks, I checked out that fstab solution thread but I don't think that would work in my case, as you need to have a UUID or at least a label for your disk partitions. When I look at my disks in disk utility, there are no UUID's, and the label for disk1's partition has a grayed out "os1". For disks 2, 3 & 4, it doesn't even show the disks having a partition - so I'm not really sure how I would reference the disks to never attempt mounting? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacUser2525 Posted May 26, 2009 Share Posted May 26, 2009 thanks, I checked out that fstab solution thread but I don't think that would work in my case, as you need to have a UUID or at least a label for your disk partitions. When I look at my disks in disk utility, there are no UUID's, and the label for disk1's partition has a grayed out "os1". For disks 2, 3 & 4, it doesn't even show the disks having a partition - so I'm not really sure how I would reference the disks to never attempt mounting? With that being the case I don't see how the fstab idea is going to work for you then unfortunately, I think I am out of ideas here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Superhai Posted May 26, 2009 Share Posted May 26, 2009 Well on all OSX systems I have OS X is doing automatic sleep on all HDD's so I am pretty sure it does it for you. It is Energy Saver option. Complete shutdown is not possible, but they will spin down and be in almost shut down state. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lsdelirious Posted May 27, 2009 Share Posted May 27, 2009 Well on all OSX systems I have OS X is doing automatic sleep on all HDD's so I am pretty sure it does it for you. It is Energy Saver option. Complete shutdown is not possible, but they will spin down and be in almost shut down state. thanks for the suggestion, but when I looked in the energy saver options, "put hard disks to sleep when possible" was already checked, and I didn't see any other harddrive related options, and yet still get the 4x "disk not recognized" messages at boot - its doubly annoying as when I reboot, it has to spin them up individually... oh well, I guess I should count myself lucky the worst of my OSX86 problems are 4 annoying messages at boot on an otherwise fast & stable system Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MacUser2525 Posted May 28, 2009 Share Posted May 28, 2009 thanks for the suggestion, but when I looked in the energy saver options, "put hard disks to sleep when possible" was already checked, and I didn't see any other harddrive related options, and yet still get the 4x "disk not recognized" messages at boot - its doubly annoying as when I reboot, it has to spin them up individually... oh well, I guess I should count myself lucky the worst of my OSX86 problems are 4 annoying messages at boot on an otherwise fast & stable system I guess I do have one more idea here but its bound to get damn annoying real fast if you do a lot of re-booting namely go into the BIOS and disable the controller for the raid drives so they will never be initialized when you boot OS X, if your BIOS allows you to save and load different profiles then you could setup one for windows another for OS X to switch between. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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