live cd - deactivate broken spindown or energy safing

[milius]

Hi!

I'm trying to wipe a HD prior to installation using dd... but if I leave the machine unattended for a while, the transfer rate goes down from 20 to 3MB/s... if then I move the mouse again, I hear the live cd spinning up again and transfer rate to the HD goes back up, too.

What's doing this / How do I deactivate this behaviour?

[thegreatgazoo]

.

[thegreatgazoo]

It's probably your "power save" settings that tells your hard drive to spin down or turn off after some amount of time of inactivity. Moving the mouse wakes it up again.

Change the spin down setting before performing a dd drive wipe.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

[milius]

I'm using the mint 14 / cinnamon boot image. There is no such thing as a "power save settings" unless you mean the "power setting" which has only two options ("hibernate" and "don't") or the "Brightness Settings" which are disabled (and probably unrelated).

Can anyone tell me what module / daemon or whatever could be doing this?

[Flemur]

Take a look at the "pm-powersave" command.

[milius]

That could have been it... no good way to test that now though. I thought pm-utils were deprecated... will Mint still be using those for a long time?

Hmm, well... is there a sysfs file or something to check the status of pm-powersave? What documentation I found for that stuff wasn't really good...