[lug] umount /dev/hda

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Thursday 29 May 2003 06:53 am, Garett Shulman wrote:
> Hello Everybody, I have a progear tablet pc running linux. I use it more
> or less as a very cool X display. I don't really run any apps on the
> progear itself. The ram is never more than half full and the swap is
> never more than 0. However, the HD spins up and down every minute. I
> have tried noflushd. no luck.

Have you tried adding "noatime" to the mount options?  This could help 
quite a bit.

> I would like to just unmount the hard
> drive and let linux exist completely in memory. Does anybody have any
> suggestions or know of any documents I might check out? Thanks a lot.

I haven't quite done this, but something almost as good.  I once fixed up a 
laptop so that all dirves were mounted read-only.  This was before Linux 
had any journalling filesystems and I wanted to be able to turn the power 
off without long fsck times on restart.

You need to make yourself a ramdisk and copy a few files/directories to it.  
Any file that changes needs to be on the ramdisk.  Symlinks are your 
friend.

Once you get it working, nothing will ever change on the disk, so the drive 
will only spin up when you need something from it.

Michael