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ultrabay hard drive manual turn on only?
Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 3:13 pm
by allen
everytime my computer starts up, or wakes up from sleeping, it starts the ultra bay disk.
is there any way to set it to only start the ultrabay when i ask it to manually?
i find myself always turning it off because i only use it sometimes, i just want it to be in there nice and cool until i need to use it.
thanks
Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 4:18 pm
by rkawakami
Need some clarification on exactly what you mean by Ultrabay disk...
- if you are talking about an optical drive (CD, DVD, etc.) that has a disk loaded in the tray and when you start or wake the system, the disk starts "playing". If so, then this falls under the heading of Windows AutoPlay. Depending upon your operating system, there's an easy way you can disable/enable this feature (XP: right-click your drive under the My Computer icon, select Properties and then the AutoPlay tab), or a hard (and potentially dangerous) way (Win2000, Win98, etc.: edit the system Registry or use something like Microsoft's TweakUI utility).
- if you are talking about a hard drive that has been mounted in the Ultrabay using an adapter, then I don't know of any way you can control it other than using Device Manager and enabling or disabling the drive that way.
Speaking of which, how are you "turning it off" now?
Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 4:26 pm
by allen
ah, sorry for the miscommunication,
i mostly am referring to a hard drive mounted in the ultrabay using adapter.
i usually turn it off from the taskbar icon for safely removing hardware, i can hear the drive stop spinning when i do so.
when i wake up the machine from sleep mode, it's back on again.
Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 5:14 pm
by rkawakami
Tried several things while hibernating my T23 with a hard drive in the Ultrabay:
- disabling the drive via Device Manager
- use the Safely Remove Hardware tool and leaving the Ultrabay eject lever extended
- disabling the drive in BIOS
None of those things kept the drive from spinning up when the system came out of hibernation. I'm out of ideas.... anybody else?
Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 6:48 pm
by mgo
rkawakami wrote:Tried several things while hibernating my T23 with a hard drive in the Ultrabay:
- disabling the drive via Device Manager
- use the Safely Remove Hardware tool and leaving the Ultrabay eject lever extended
- disabling the drive in BIOS
None of those things kept the drive from spinning up when the system came out of hibernation. I'm out of ideas.... anybody else?
How about Power settings to turn off hard drives after a couple of minutes or so?
Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 8:44 pm
by rkawakami
I would suspect that the drive will also "wake-up" once the laptop is taken out of hibernation but should go into a low-power mode after the 3 minutes have expired. Still, the drive is powered up so I don't know if that's suitable for the OP's requirement.
Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 10:39 pm
by gator
Tried this with my T60, and was not able to find a way to "shut-off" the device so that it does not wake up when the sytem powers on from standby or hibernation ... I don't think any thinkpad has this feature built-in ... this might be a good suggestion to make to Lenovo.
one "semi-automatic" way I can think of is to pull the ultrabay release lever after you have hibernated the machine (or after you eject the drivebefore hibernating) and not put it back in. I have realised that the machine does not recognise the ultrabay drive until the level is pushed in and the green LED glows.