alawlor@dit.ie (Aengus Lawlor) (03/15/90)
I have a number of utilities that claim to "park" the heads on my hard disk.
Can a generic utility work, or should it be written specifically for the drive
in question?
If my prompt is set to $p$g ( ie it shows my path) do my heads get "unparked"
immediately after they have been parked, if DOS reads the current path to
display it (this seems to happen after every command on a floppy).
I had the utility that came with my hard disk on my path, but when my machine
came back from a service today, it had been "updated". The old utility
deliberately went into an endless loop, so you had to reset to get the machine
back, but the new one "parks" and returns me to my prompt. Does this work?
Thanks.
--
Aengus Lawlor Dept of Computer Science. Time flies like an arrow,
ALAWLOR@DIT.IE Dublin Institute of Technology. Fruit-flies like a banana
Kevin Street. Dublin 8. Ireland. RFM@psuvm.psu.edu (03/18/90)
Generics -- don't know for sure ... but Zenith includes a utility called "Ship" with their versions of MS-DOS 3.2 & 3.3. It works like a champ. You run it and it not only parks heads, but it locks up your whole systems as well! Bob M. - Penn State - Harrisburg. HAPPY ST. PADDY's DAY!!!!!
jdudeck@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (John R. Dudeck) (03/19/90)
I have been wondering about this. I have a number of park utilities. The question is what it does when you have partitions. Some of them will say something like, "Drive C: head parked. Drive D: head parked." I know good and well that I only have one drive, and it has two partitions. This does not inspire too much confidence. What if I had three partitions, and the third one was not a DOS paritition. Would it just leave it parked at the end of the second partition? This whole issue is further clouded by the fact that many drives are auto- parking. But which drives? -- John Dudeck "You want to read the code closely..." jdudeck@Polyslo.CalPoly.Edu -- C. Staley, in OS course, teaching ESL: 62013975 Tel: 805-545-9549 Tanenbaum's MINIX operating system.