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Hard Drive and Long Distance Move

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by smurf0421

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In the old days, if you were moving your computer a considerable distance, you were advised to "Park" the hard drive. Is this still the case, and if so, does anyone remember how to do it?

2 replies

by epepke

I remember how to do it. Select Shut Down. That's part of what it's for.

You probably remember the old days, when the power switch was physically in line with the power, but it isn't that way any more. That's one of the reasons that Apple introduced non-power-switch power switches and why it's been picked up by many manufacturers of Wintel boxes.

Also, most modern drives auto-park after a few minutes of inactivity.

by rzan

Parking the hard drive was done in the old days of MFM and RLL hard drives. With today's high speed IDE and SCSI drives, the parking is done automatically when you shut down power to your PC. What parking does is move the read/write head to track 0 (the inner most ring on the platter) to prevent damage to the head. There was a DOS utility to do this back in the good old days of DOS 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x. But GOD forbid you run this utility on today's IDE drives..you may as well take your hard drive out and trash it because you will crash the drive for sure. Be careful what you read in PC repair manuals because a lot of the information is outdated and pertains to original IBM 8086 architecture which used MFM and RLL hard drives which required manual parking. In today's drives, don't even worry about it, it is all done automatically by the firmware on the drive.

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