Drives spinup for no reason

[scaryjeff]

I'm running win2k pro SP4. I have a CD drive, a CD writer, and two Hard drives, and the hard drives are set to turn off after half an hour. The problem comes when I go to shut the PC down, windows decides it needs to spin up both CD drives if there is a CD in them, and the secondary hard drive (which has no program files or anything to do with windows on it) before it can shut down. Is there anything I can do to stop this?

 

[kennyj]

It's hard to say exactly what the OS is doing, but it's probably syncing the disks in order to unmount them. The only way to stop it is to unmount the drives beforehand, which will probably result in them being spun up then. (though the CD you can simply eject.)

This is a feature, not a bug, as it's intended to make sure that there are no mistakes made with the disks when shutting down. Not syncing and unmounting has a similar effect to simply yanking the power cord, it can bork the filesystem pretty good.

 

[scaryjeff]

I can understand that with the hard drives, but surely the CD filesystem can't be modified anyway, and so in not unmounting it properly, what damage can you do?

 

[kennyj]

it could also be an antivirus app checking bootable volumes for boot virii just in case, or any kind of funky, poorly-thought-out code. Your guess is as good as mine.