E16 and Ubuntu 10.04 irritating periodic beep

[Roger Munford]

I bought the E16 a few days ago and installed Ubuntu (32bit).

There was an irritating periodic soft beep every 30 secs or so. Putting my ear to the laptop I could hear a motor start after the beep which stopped just before beeping again and repeating. I thought that there was a problem with power management.

Without really knowing what was going on I found several references to laptop-mode-tools and installing that cured it. I do not know why but it somebody has an explanation I would be happy to hear it.

Regards


Roger

[Sander314]

My new v14 does the same. Have the feeling it's a hdd thing.

[ckinren]

My E16 with ubuntu 10.4 also had the beeping issue, but thanks to the info installing "laptop-mode-tools" also seems to have resolved the problem.

craig

[RogerGrumble]

Same thing with my E16. I'm pretty certain that the noise is the hard disk heads "unparking" prior to the disk spinning up. The power management seems to be very agressive - the disk spins down at every opportunity. Installing laptop-mode-tools didn't seem to help. I haven't got to the bottom of this yet but my gut feeling is that it's not too important at this stage!

[Juillen]

It's vital that you get the disk head parking/respin sorted out. HDDs have a limited spin up/spin down life, and if it's spinning up and down every minute, you'll soon chew through the lifespan of your drive (about 6 months).
laptop-mode-tools should sort the problem out in extended operation (after you get to load everything in), and it does a multitude of buffer management and write consolidation tasks which leave the disk alone unless absolutely needed (for a good overview, read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerManagement).

[iceolate]

I ran into trouble with this after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10 from 10.04, it seems that some of the power management utilities got into conflict - and I no longer have working suspend/stand by/hibernate options.

However the main issue was the spin down frequency of the hard drive as described above.

The best tutorial on the matter with a resolution that worked can be found at
http://www.chrisbaume.co.uk/?p=141 and there is some discussion here in relation to a Novatech (Odin) laptop http://www.linuxlaptops2go.co.uk/content/odin-hard-disk-spin-down-frequency

best wishes