Hello, ATA/SMART fellows.

This message is regarding crazy head unloads on certain laptops.  In a 
desperate attempt to increase battery time, some vendors configure ATA 
APM (advanced power management) too aggressive to the point of being 
fragile (can even be triggered on Windows) and the drive unloads head 
like crazy and kills itself quickly (in months).  For more information, 
please take a look at the following links.

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=386555
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking

This primarily is those hardware vendors' faults and updating their 
firmware is probably the best way to fix it; however, it can actually 
kill the harddrive which usually causes a lot of anxiety and stress on 
the user, so I think we need to take some measures.

Attached are storage-fixup script which is to be called during boot and 
resume and configuration file to go under /etc.  The script can match 
dmi and hal properties and execute commands on the matching devices. 
The config file currently only contains three rules.

Here are two ideas to better handle this problem:

1. Describe the problem on linux-ata.org and ask people to report 
dmidecode and hdparm -I output on affected machines.  Share 
storage-fixup (or any other alternative) and storage-fixup.conf on the page.

2. This is from Roland.  Make smartd aware of the problem and warn user 
if load/unload count per powered on hours goes too high.  Maybe the 
warning can direct the user to linux-ata.org page?

Thanks.

-- 
tejun