Ubuntu
acpi-support package

  1. Bug #59695
  2. Comment #28

Comment 28 for bug 59695

Revision history for this message
Blue (vali-dragnuta) wrote : Re: default value in power.sh potentially kills laptop disks

I confirm this and more : same behaviour on a _desktop_ computer. This because on that desktop on_ac_power returns nonzero and the system thinks it's running on batteries.
The actual hdparm setting is here :
/etc/apm/event.d/20hdparm
This creates TWO new bugs :
1. first one is that this script runs AFTER /etc/init.d/hdparm so if we set -S0 in /etc/hdparm.conf to disable this behaviour , the setting will have no effect as it will be overset by 20hdparm
2. second bug is that in /etc/apm/event.d/20hdparm line 64 the script does not treat the case where on_ac_power returns 255 (could not determine state). In this case, the power conserve mode should NOT be activated.

Anyway, as a temporary workaround you can edit /etc/apm/event.d/20hdparm and set on line 32 APMD_SPINDOWN to a saner value. Also, it would be nice to move this parameter in /etc/default so that it is cleanly configurable.