When shutting down computer, park the heads so there's no chunk
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#364 When shutting down computer, park the heads so there's no chunk
As of 2.7.1.22-amd64, when you choose to shut down the system after Clonezilla has done its thing, please make Clonezilla park the heads of your external disk drive, or internal, so that there's no hard chunk sound when the power is cut, as happens now. Do it before the countdown starts, where Clonezilla will "safely remove" the device, and then cut the power. Since the drive has done its thing, it just be a silent power off when the computer is shut off.
So you mean to run something like:
hdparm -y /dev/sdx
?
Steven
I'm not familiar with that command, but, yes, if it will make the system finish all the reads and writes, then tell the device to power off or park the heads into position before cutting power to the system. Do it for any internal and external devices.
We have implemented this mechanism for Clonezilla live >= 2.7.2-30 or 20210511-*:
https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php
Please give it a try and let us know the results.
Thanks.
Steven
I started up clonezilla 2.7.2-30.amd64 and chose the VGA, large font, to RAM option. I'll note that the first Clonezilla program screen did not display as large font but the subsequent screens did.
Other than that, there still is the "chunk" sound. There must be some built-in option in the linux kernel to safely dismount the volumes and to power off external drives before cutting power to the main system. I'm using a Western Digital external hard drive, powered through the USB port, and the USB port is one of those powered ports on my Acer laptop that will send power to the external device even though the computer is turned off.
I tried 2.7.2-32-amd64.iso, vga large font to RAM, and, the Choose Language screen and the Choose Keyboard Layout screen are still at small font, but the subsequent ones are large.
Also, Clonezilla says that the image will be written to home/... and yet I don't know why it doesn't say sdb, because I chose to save it to sdb, not home/ .
I do get a "bad/missing sense data" when trying to dismount my external drive, but no such message when dismounting the internal drive, but despite that message, the drive heads will spin down. The thing, though, is that the heads spin down while the countdown starts, which is good, but then when linux begins ITS shutdown, the external drive spins up again. And so when I was doing this test with the drive plugged into the non-usb-c port, the system would shut down and the drive would spin down without chunking. However, when plugged into the usb-c port, the only one I have on my acer laptop, what happens is the drive will spin up while debian is shutting down, and then chunk when the system's power is cut. Maybe this is a long-standing issue with debian that you could send some code in to fix. Or, if you're compiling the system yourself, then you could add the code to the debian system so that debian will dismount the drive, spin down the heads when plugged into the powered usb c port, as it does when plugged into the other usb ports. When I choose "reboot" instead of "power off", there's no chunking.
also tried 20210518 hirsute and that one also chunks, but not surprising since Ubuntu is based on debian
Sorry I should say that all the ports are usb-c, but the one port is usb-c 3.0 and the other are usb-c 2.0
Hello,
Is it possible to disable this behavior somehow, because it is doing a lot more harm than good?
Firstly, it spins down the HDDs even when you select reboot, so the disks spin down only to spin up a few seconds later.
This is definitely not good for the disks, since they haven't fully spun down before spinning up again.
Theoretically, this should help when powering off, but in my case it worked this way:
The disks spun down, then they spun up again and finally the computer turned off causing Power-off Retract Count to increase.
So to prevent these issues I need to do hard reset of the system while Clonezilla is running.
I would suggest to revert this change or try to implement a better logic - spin down only when powering off and do it in a way that disks don't spin up again before power is removed.
Regards,
Cyril
Sure, we can try to narrow it down to poweroff only. This makes sense. Will try to do that in the future release.
Steven
Forgot to mentioned, several months ago, this action will only work before shutting down. No more before rebooting. So in the stable Clonezilla live 3.1.0-22 you should find this.
Steven
Nope, this does not work, as of 3.1.0.22-amd64
The external and internal drives spin down, and then they spin up again and then there's a chunk noise as power is cut.
As I think I wrote before, perhaps the clonezilla program is properly shutting down the hard drives, but then perhaps it's the underlying operating system that for some reason has some unwritten data in the cache, so it feels it needs to turn on the hard drives again. So perhaps it's an issue that needs to be fixed with the underlying operating system, or maybe it's a command you can execute... you know what to do. :)
Actually I have no idea how to deal with the underlying OS... If you have any solution, please let us know.
Thanks.
Steven
Thank you for fixing this!