Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ncar!gatech!udel!udccvax1!anand
From: anand@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Anand Iyengar)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Leaving the hard disk on continuously
Keywords: hard disk park
Message-ID: <1647@udccvax1.acs.udel.EDU>
Date: 19 Jul 88 03:16:48 GMT
References: <12184@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Reply-To: anand@vax1.acs.udel.EDU (Anand Iyengar)
Organization: The Lab Rats
Lines: 19

In article <12184@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> cotner@bosco.berkeley.edu.UUCP (Carl Cotner) writes:
>Now I hear that I should park the heads of my disk whenever it is not in 
>use to prevent data corruption from a power surge.  That sounds reasonable.
>When I bought my Mountain HardDrive, the disk came with a head parking utility
>for such a purpose.  Now I'm wondering how do I UNPARK the hard disk to use it
>again?  
	Parking the heads just means moving them over a part of the disk that
you don't care about (a place where you don't have any data stored -- usually
the extreme inside (or outside) of the platter).  This is done so that if the
drive is disturbed in some obscure (or not so obscure) manner, and the heads
somehow try to change some data, the data will be garbage anyway, and not
something that you care about (usually the heads are "parked" over a cylinder
which is not in the area for storage, so there's really no data there at all).	

	You don't need to worry about unparking the heads: just use the drive
as you normally would (pretent it's not parked), and the heads will return to
the storage area to read data -- it just takes them slightly longer to do so.


							Anand.