Shutting down hard drive from bios

[bridgetroll]

Hi, does anyone know if there is a bios setting on the NF4 Ultra-D to shut down a specific hard drive so that it doesn't spin up on startup?

I have a second hard drive in my system which I use mainly for backup, but it's quite noisy so it would be nice to not have it running all the time. Unfortunately windows xp doesn't seem to allow you to set power management options separately for individual drives. I've tried searching for a third party app which would enable me to power down the obnoxious drive on a whim, but haven't been able to find anything. Please let me know if you have a solution (other than opening the case and unplugging the power cable)

[Anonymous1]

I havent checked personally, but can you select it in the BIOS where you choose the boot sequence? You know, like "disable" instead of 1st, 2nd, or 3rd boot device...or does it not differentiate between drives...just the HDD in general?

[David James]

Let me know if you find anything - my current solution is to set the drives to power down after 15 mins, and I have a script running that pings my system drive more often, so it is always on.

[sluggo]

I know this isn't much help to you now, but if it's still important to you the next time you buy a drive, SCSI supports programmatic spin-up and spin-down on a per-device basis (and a lot of other low-level commands).

[red930]

The nF4 BIOS specifically does not support drive locking. As stated earlier it's only supported on SCSI drives. In general only server BIOSes offer that option and very few of them continue to offer it today.

[bridgetroll]

Thanks for the replies. I've been trying to find out about this for a while, and I guess I finally have my answer.