# Inspiron 6000 -- hard drive noise on shutdown

## eincello

Any owners of a Dell Inspiron 6000 notice this phenomenon?  When I shut down the laptop, when the hard drive finally loses power and spins down, I hear a brief whistle with an almost percussive edge.  It has been doing this for a while, and the drive has never failed to function.  It did not make the sound under Windows (which I have recently removed completely -- WOOHOO!).  Any ideas what's going wrong at shutdown??

----------

## linuxtuxhellsinki

I think there's nothing wrong with shutdown (in software side) and I think your hd is going to break. Usually it's going to break sooner or later when it's starting to make noises (all which I've readed about)

Check it with smartmontools, like running some tests on it. #smartctl -a /dev/hda  and with option -t  to make those tests.

And start to make some backups of your important data (just in case)

----------

## MerlinTheWizard

 *eincello wrote:*   

> Any owners of a Dell Inspiron 6000 notice this phenomenon?  When I shut down the laptop, when the hard drive finally loses power and spins down, I hear a brief whistle with an almost percussive edge.  It has been doing this for a while, and the drive has never failed to function.  It did not make the sound under Windows (which I have recently removed completely -- WOOHOO!).  Any ideas what's going wrong at shutdown??

 

If it wasn't doing that before, you can suspect something has gone wrong with your hard drive.

That being said, if your HD happens to be a Hitachi, I'm not too surprised. They are famous for making various noises when they park their heads. I have one of those in my laptop, and although it works pretty fine, the "parking" noise is very annoying.

----------

## eincello

 *linuxtuxhellsinki wrote:*   

> ... I think your hd is going to break.... 

 

The thing is, I could shutdown in Windows (no sound), then boot Linux and shutdown again and the noise would happen.  So I'm pretty sure the drive is healthy.

 *linuxtuxhellsinki wrote:*   

> Check it with smartmontools, like running some tests on it. #smartctl -a /dev/hda  and with option -t  to make those tests.

 

Since this drive is an SATA disk, smartmontools won't work with it (hdparm doesn't work either):

```
$ smartctl -a /dev/sda

SATA disks accessed via libata are not currently supported by

smartmontools. When libata is given an ATA pass-thru ioctl() then an

additional '-d libata' device type will be added to smartmontools.

```

 *MerlinTheWizard wrote:*   

> if your HD happens to be a Hitachi, I'm not too surprised. They are famous for making various noises when they park their heads. I have one of those in my laptop, and although it works pretty fine, the "parking" noise is very annoying.

 

My invoice says it's made by Toshiba.  Dunno what their record of noises looks like...

Anyone have a guess?  Are there disk-tuning tools available for SATA drives?  If there are, I haven't been able to find them.

----------

## linuxtuxhellsinki

 *eincello wrote:*   

> 
> 
> Since this drive is an SATA disk, smartmontools won't work with it (hdparm doesn't work either):
> 
> Anyone have a guess?  Are there disk-tuning tools available for SATA drives?  If there are, I haven't been able to find them.

 

Try sdparm maybe it works ?

& if there was no noise when U shutdown in w-doh's then it has to be some software problem.

But you said that you wiped it out, so were there the noise only in Linux side and in same time no noise at W side (only want to be sure, cause it sounds quite strange)

----------

## eincello

 *linuxtuxhellsinki wrote:*   

> Try sdparm maybe it works ?
> 
> ...so were there the noise only in Linux side and in same time no noise at W side (only want to be sure, cause it sounds quite strange)

 

That's correct.  While I still had W-doh's (heh heh) installed, Linux made the noise but not Windows.

Trying sdparm now...

----------

## eincello

Ok, I've tried hdparm, sdparm, and blktool -- without success.

There's one thing I want to try, but I haven't been able to figure it out.  At the end of the shutdown cycle, Gentoo likes to remount the filesystems read-only.  How can I get it to not do that??

----------

## widan

 *eincello wrote:*   

> There's one thing I want to try, but I haven't been able to figure it out.  At the end of the shutdown cycle, Gentoo likes to remount the filesystems read-only.  How can I get it to not do that??

 

It unmounts everything it can, then remounts the rest (usually only the root filesystem) read-only. You certainly don't want to shutdown with filesystems still mounted read-write (unless you want a corrupt filesystem).

----------

## eincello

What I mean is, how do I get Gentoo to not remount any filesystems at all?  Maybe that's not the problem, but I've exhausted my knowledge of where to search for the answer.

----------

## eincello

Ok, so I think the problem is that Gentoo leaves a handful of filesystems (including /) mounted (ro) when it halts.  What changes do I make to the init system to not remount anything?

----------

## m0rd0

Was this ever fixed?  I've got an Inspiron 6000 and it does exactly the same thing.

----------

## eviLinside

 *m0rd0 wrote:*   

> Was this ever fixed?  I've got an Inspiron 6000 and it does exactly the same thing.

 

I'm thinking about buying the inspiron 6000, I'm not too sure though yet! It's only $644 now its a great deal for such a nice laptop.

----------

## m0rd0

Its a great little laptop but I'd highly recommend going for the 1680 x 1050 resolution screen as it makes a world of difference.  My previous laptop was 1200 x 800 and it just didn't do it for me, 1680 x 1050 looks great and gives you enough desktop space to work the way you want.

The ONLY down side to buying this laptop is Dell support. Mine came with a faulty motherboard (It couldn't run on battery for more than 3 minutes before locking up).  Dell were great about picking up the laptop, but total crap at giving me information on its progress.  I lost count of the amount of times I got diverted to a call centre in India who were unable to give me any kind of information.  They didn't even inform me when the laptop was returned to me, and as I work on a secure site it led to a few problems.

In short, love the laptop, hate the company.

PM me if you want any more info.

- m0rd0

----------

## eincello

 *m0rd0 wrote:*   

>  . . . I'd highly recommend going for the 1680 x 1050 resolution screen . . . 

 

I completely agree.  I have the 1280x800, and it's ok, but I would really like to have a little more room.

 *eviLinside wrote:*   

> I'm thinking about buying the inspiron 6000, I'm not too sure though yet! It's only $644 now its a great deal for such a nice laptop.

 

You're getting it ever cheaper than I got it.  Definitely read this post to get a feel for what's involved in getting everything working.  But I'd say, with a price that low, go for it.

----------

## eincello

 *m0rd0 wrote:*   

> Was this ever fixed? I've got an Inspiron 6000 and it does exactly the same thing.

 

No, I have yet to fix this problem.  I've recently tried Ubuntu on the 6000, with the same results.  Again, does not happen in Windoze.  One last plea, do any veterans know how to get Gentoo to not remount the partitions on the hard drive when shutting down???  Or, is something else wrong???

----------

## m0rd0

eincello: Just wondering what hard disk you have in your Inspiron 6000.  I went for the free upgrade to 80gig and got an ATA Fujitsu MHV2080A.  

I realise what we seem to be experiencing is software related, but i'm wondering if it might also be disk specific because its something that I haven't seen mentioned in many other Inspiron 6000 related posts.

- m0rd0

----------

## m0rd0

So I went to the Gentoo Inspiron 6000 Tips & Tricks forum as its currently 20 pages long and tends to be occupied by a lot of people who know their stuff.  Anyway, I asked if anyone else had this hard drive noise and got:

 *Quote:*   

> I might be wrong but I think it's the noise your hard disk does when it's going to park. In early times when computers were not that clever () one had to park the disk before the computer could power down otherwise the disk could be damaged. Look, you had to type park on the command line (MSDOS of course)... [Don't shout at me for being old - computers were that popular only 10 years ago :p . ]
> 
> Parking makes the magnetic head go to a given sector that is safe for power down. Nowadays disks park automatically on power down.
> 
> My laptop also does such kind of noise (if I have understood you correctly). There is a slight whistle then a smooth, brief percussion, like a "wizzz ... cloc" noise. This is normal. I wonder why it doesn't occur with Winblowze. Maybe it has the head park elsewhere - IIRC there are two places to park: at the end or at the beginning of the disk, i.e. closest to or farthest from the spinning axis. In that case maybe one parking place produces more noise than the other?...

 

If its a common trait among the Inspiron range then it could be they really are just parking noises, just very loud ones.  Why it doesn't happen in Windows is beyond me, maybe its not doing it at the last minute the way Gentoo does or as the guy above suggested maybe its just parking in a different area of the disk.  I wasn't even sure modern disks needed head parking areas, but with the knocks a laptop gets I guess it would.

If I find anything else out I'll post it here.

----------

## eincello

 *m0rd0 wrote:*   

> eincello: Just wondering what hard disk you have in your Inspiron 6000. I went for the free upgrade to 80gig and got an ATA Fujitsu MHV2080A.

 

I have the standard 40gb SATA Toshiba MK4026GAX.

 *Quote:*   

> My laptop also does such kind of noise (if I have understood you correctly). There is a slight whistle then a smooth, brief percussion, like a "wizzz ... cloc" noise.

 

Just for reference, mine seems to be just the opposite -- the 'cloc' sound happens at the beginning of the whistle, then the whistle faids away within maybe 1/4 second.

----------

## muhal

Hi,

That's my 1st post here.  :Very Happy: 

Now I'm using Ubuntu 5.10 on my Inspiron 6000 and I noticed the same noise when I poweroff as well as little noises (about 30% volume of that 'poweroff one') when the system is completely idle. It is not happening when running Window$ so I'm 95% sure that the hard drive is OK. Did any one of you noticed these 'noises' when system is idle?

muhal

----------

## eincello

 *muhal wrote:*   

> Now I'm using Ubuntu 5.10 on my Inspiron 6000 and I noticed the same noise when I poweroff as well as little noises (about 30% volume of that 'poweroff one') when the system is completely idle. It is not happening when running Window$ so I'm 95% sure that the hard drive is OK. Did any one of you noticed these 'noises' when system is idle? 

 

The shutdown noise seems to be fairly common (I got it with Gentoo and Ubuntu 5.10).  I've never noticed any other noises while idle, though.  It may be something Ubuntu is running in the background, pehaps updating the slocate index or some other cron job.

----------

