USB hd not powering down

English Hardware
#1

I have an external hd that is hooked up to one of my usb ports. I’ve always had problems with this drive not powering off completely whenever I shut my machine down when running Linux. If I shut the machine down after running my Windows partition, it shuts down fine. The blue power lights on the front of the drive go off. It will not do this in Linux without a change to the kernel.

I’ve just finished messing around with some of the settings in Yast / etc/sysconfig editor, and I may have found something that helps. If I set “System/Boot/Halt” to “halt” then the hd shuts down when the machine is off. Unfortunately this changes how the machine shuts down as well. After telling the machine to turn off, I have to eventually hold the on/off button on the machine to get it to shutdown completely.

Does anyone know what I can do to get both my ext hd to shutdown and also to have the machine shutdown automatically without having to hold the on/off button?

Thanks!

#2

Gumper,

try and disable “USB legacy device support” (or similar) in the BIOS.

Uwe

#3

I looked in my bios and I didn’t see any setting like you mentioned.

Does anyone know what actually is happening when I change the setting of “System/Boot/Halt” to “halt”?

#4

Try running as root from a terminal:
shutdown - h now
and see if it works.
I am using old hardware with an external usb and sles shuts down fine.

#5

I tried your suggestions but it doesn’t help. My machine shuts down but the external drive still stays running.

Thanks for the help though!

#6

Does the disk get power from the computer or does it have an external source? I think you may find that the usb port stays powered after shutdown. If this is the case, there must be an option in the motherboard bios to shut it down.

My usb drive gave overcurrent problems when I first got it so I use a separate usb card in the pc to run it and not the pcs own usb ports.

#7

After doing some Googling I was able to come up with a solution. By using the command:

 sh -c 'echo "suspend" > level'

after “cd’ing” into the proper usb port, the drive will power down. I’m currently writing a script that will make sure that the drive is unmounted, flushed and spundown before doing so.