Ubuntu Live CD Q

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Originally Posted By: badtlc
Your hard drive was still spinning unless you went into the disk manager and enabled powersaving to turn the hard drive off.


Unless it was mounted from the live Ubuntu media, I am not entirely sure it was ever spun up to begin with. ("I am not sure" are the operative words, here.) I just booted a laptop this morning with the 14.04 beta to see if the hardware played nicely with Ubuntu and I swear I did not hear the HDD spin up at any point.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
Originally Posted By: badtlc
Your hard drive was still spinning unless you went into the disk manager and enabled powersaving to turn the hard drive off.


Unless it was mounted from the live Ubuntu media, I am not entirely sure it was ever spun up to begin with. ("I am not sure" are the operative words, here.) I just booted a laptop this morning with the 14.04 beta to see if the hardware played nicely with Ubuntu and I swear I did not hear the HDD spin up at any point.


A hard drive is spun up by default. You turn power on, the hard drive spins until it is told not to. You don't load up an OS and then tell the hard drive to come on. You have to intentionally tell the system to turn it off. Power saving is done at the software level, not at a low level bios/hardware level.

You don't hear hard drives spin for the most part. You hear hard drives read/write or spin up/down. A spinning hard drive (especially on a laptop) isn't going to make much if any audible noise and you are likely to miss it because it is constant white noise. There is no clicking for you to discern it.

Mounting only allows you to read/write a partition. It has nothing to do with turning a drive off or on other than reading/writing can affect HDD turnoff timers and reset the counter.
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted By: badtlc
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
Originally Posted By: badtlc
Your hard drive was still spinning unless you went into the disk manager and enabled powersaving to turn the hard drive off.


Unless it was mounted from the live Ubuntu media, I am not entirely sure it was ever spun up to begin with. ("I am not sure" are the operative words, here.) I just booted a laptop this morning with the 14.04 beta to see if the hardware played nicely with Ubuntu and I swear I did not hear the HDD spin up at any point.


A hard drive is spun up by default. You turn power on, the hard drive spins until it is told not to. You don't load up an OS and then tell the hard drive to come on. You have to intentionally tell the system to turn it off. Power saving is done at the software level, not at a low level bios/hardware level.

You don't hear hard drives spin for the most part. You hear hard drives read/write or spin up/down. A spinning hard drive (especially on a laptop) isn't going to make much if any audible noise and you are likely to miss it because it is constant white noise. There is no clicking for you to discern it.

Mounting only allows you to read/write a partition. It has nothing to do with turning a drive off or on other than reading/writing can affect HDD turnoff timers and reset the counter.

This is an old LT...emphasis on old. I can easily hear it when it R/W. It may have spun up...may. But it was very quiet when running Ubuntu. I'll do an experiment next time when Ubuntu is booted from the stick and turn off the HD. The R/W light is very noticeable and not once did I see it flicker. I understand your point that it may still be spinning, but I'll further investigate next time.
 
Originally Posted By: sleddriver

This is an old LT...emphasis on old. I can easily hear it when it R/W. It may have spun up...may. But it was very quiet when running Ubuntu. I'll do an experiment next time when Ubuntu is booted from the stick and turn off the HD. The R/W light is very noticeable and not once did I see it flicker. I understand your point that it may still be spinning, but I'll further investigate next time.


There is no "may" about it. It is how the parts are designed and how they work. It isn't a complicated setup. Like I said previously, HDDs have to spin up on power up. They have to be running BEFORE an OS is loaded because the OS is loaded from the HDD. They can only shut down IF the OS tells them to. It is a fail safe design.

If you want a HDD to not spin on startup and w/out having power saving settings enabled once you boot into an OS, unplug it or remove it from the laptop.
 
Originally Posted By: badtlc
They have to be running BEFORE an OS is loaded because the OS is loaded from the HDD. They can only shut down IF the OS tells them to. It is a fail safe design.


But live media never touch the HDD. Booting takes place from a boot sector on a USB drive or optical disc. I use Ubuntu live media with *NO* HDD all the time.
 
You took the words right off my keyboard UC! Beat me to it.

Re: Badtlc. I'm not going to argue the point with you. I started this thread to create a liveDVD and note my experiences with both Ubuntu & Mint. I've succeeded at both. As I mentioned previously, I will investigate further re: turning off the HD. But this is a very minor point.

Back to having fun experimenting with Linux......
 
badtlc is correct: the HDD will spin up when the computer is powered-on. That is because in most cases, the OS will be loaded from the HDD...and you obviously have to have the HDD spinning to be able to load it.

The fact that you can (and often do) load OSes straight from a USB key doesn't remove the "power-on" call that the computer hardware gives to the HDD as a part of every power up sequence. If the HDD is not present in the system, then it will obviously not spin up. If the HDD is installed but unplugged, then it will obviously not spin up. If the HDD is plugged-in when the computer is turned on, it DOES power on and spin up, even if you load the OS from a USB key and don't actually touch the HDD.
 
Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
If the HDD is not present in the system, then it will obviously not spin up.


If your HDD is not present in the system but spins up when you power the system up, you have done something horribly wrong (sudo apt-get install evil-spirit), and you will likely require a priest or exorcist. ;^)

Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
If the HDD is plugged-in when the computer is turned on, it DOES power on and spin up, even if you load the OS from a USB key and don't actually touch the HDD.


At that point, the HDD is subject to the BIOS power saving functions, yes? Ergo it may spin down after a few minutes of non-activity?
 
Originally Posted By: badtlc
If you want a HDD to not spin on startup and w/out having power saving settings enabled once you boot into an OS, unplug it or remove it from the laptop.


Oops. I missed that part. (So *all* the words are important, it seems!) Point taken.
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
Originally Posted By: Hokiefyd
If the HDD is plugged-in when the computer is turned on, it DOES power on and spin up, even if you load the OS from a USB key and don't actually touch the HDD.


At that point, the HDD is subject to the BIOS power saving functions, yes? Ergo it may spin down after a few minutes of non-activity?


Perhaps, yes. It's my understanding that power-saving features were the domain of the software (OS). I don't know if the BIOS has the authority to turn off a spinning hard drive. I know that you can set in the BIOS some left-and-right boundaries for the software (OS) to power it down, but I don't know if the BIOS itself can do it.

I would actually think not. I would think that the operating system alone would make the call to turn the drive off (if you have allowed it to in the BIOS). You wouldn't want a situation where the operating system expects the drive to be available, even after a period of inactivity, when it actually isn't.
 
Update:
Something is quite amiss. Suddenly I only see a lone arrow on a dark screen when running UB 14 from a stick. Happened yesterday for the first time. Thought maybe the stick had gone Tango Uniform, so I 're-created' it today, plugged it into the same Dell B130 LT and no joy (screen).

I can see the backlight is lit and all pixels are dark.

Yesterday I pulled the stick and booted into Wxp with no problems. Any suggestions here?
 
Answered my own Q...booted U12.xx from the DVD I had earlier created. No worries. So it would seem the problem lies with the Verbatim mem-stick. Perhaps a section is corrupt? I am able to see the directory when the stick is plugged into my DT (Wxp). However, it was very slow to appear.
 
Update:

Still experiencing the same problem with UB 14 using Lili on the same LT. Don't understand what changed. I checked the stick for errors under Wxp, then formatted it FAT32, then ran Lili again to install UB 14 .iso.

It gets to the Install UB or Live Mode. Once I saw a message regarding "this computer only has 0bytes of disk space remaining." I'm using an 8Gb stick.

Checked 'properties' of mem-stick in Wxp machine, Used space = 1G; free space = 6.4G. total 7.43G.

All I see is a cursor arrow....odd. Very odd.

Unable to open a terminal window. What is UB's language for cntrl-option-shift-delete? Esc does nothing. Please advise.
 
Decided to try the same stick in the other Dell B130 (with only 500Mb ram). A msg popped up saying the installation had failed, then I very briefly saw the "This computer only has 0 bytes of disk space remaining", followed by "The system is operating in low-graphics mode. Your screen, graphics card, and input device could not be detected correctly. You will need to configure these yourself."

After touching OK, I see another screen:

What would like to do?: (1) Run in low graphics mode for one session? (2) reconfigure graphics. (3) Troubleshoot the error. (4) exit to console login.

Being adventurous, I chose door #3. There was nothing in 'review start-up errors' so I chose review the xserver log file. From what I can make of it, it reached a point where it's trying to communicate with the Intel graphics chipset and unable to do so or find the correct drivers, so it begins unloading whereupon it halts.

How would I check for a defective stick?
 
Update:
Well, well....used a new PNY 8G "stub-stick". Formatted in FAT32, setup using Lili as before. No joy. Wouldn't work. Evidently unable to work with Intel graphics due to 'no room'.

So I erased it, reformated, used Lili again, though in step 3 increased persistence disk allocation from 50MB to 150MB. I thought this 'area' was only for additional things I might save like bookmarks, a few files maybe.

Booted the B130 with 2G ram from it and the Unity desktop appeared! So something is going on here I didn't know about. When I checked the boot-disk-properties, it showed a 157MB disk. However, it won't allow me to 'examine' it. I can examine both partitions of the installed HD, one with WXP installed, the other just for files, but not the boot-usb. "Unable to access 157MB volume."

Interesting.....

Didn't understand what Lili was asking for here. I'm guessing if I set persistence to 0MB, then it would only create a LIVEDVD, to try out. Once you start adding MB however, there is definitely a threshold and it's over 50MB.

Where are all the Linux pro's?
 
I'd have to do some experimenting. I've never really messed around much with booting from USB sticks, since I like to have an optical drive of some sort, and you know how it was years back, with USB sticks excessively expensive while CDs and DVDs were not.
 
I keep an Ubuntu LTS on a USB stick on my person at all times. It's been great to show people who are curious; and if they are up for it and I have the time, I can install immediately! (And unless their system has only USB 1.1 the USB install is much faster than with optical media.)
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
I keep an Ubuntu LTS on a USB stick on my person at all times.

Funny you mention that. Ironically, I've been doing the same thing for a few months without knowing it. I normally carry a USB stick to deal with surveillance footage at one of my businesses, since the server has no optical drive (much to my chagrin). When I pulled some files off last week, I noticed I had a couple Ubuntu images on there.
wink.gif
 
Originally Posted By: uc50ic4more
I keep an Ubuntu LTS on a USB stick on my person at all times. It's been great to show people who are curious; and if they are up for it and I have the time, I can install immediately! (And unless their system has only USB 1.1 the USB install is much faster than with optical media.)

Interesting idea! I should start doing that.
smile.gif
 
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