Hi friends.
Does Linux auto-powerdown a SATA hard-disk, if none of its partitions are being used/mounted? I have a WD 250GB drive on a SATA port, with ext3 partitions. 2-3 times I heard swishing sounds and clicks. This morning I fired up the Partition editor after one such event and found that the drive was not listed in the partition editor. A reboot fixed the problem.
Another issue was I am getting 'could not read block <7-8 digit number>' errors (which would terminate all the operations) when I tried to merge two partitions on this drive - by deleting one and growing the other. I got same error when I deleted the second one and created a new one of size equal to sum of earlier drives. I succeeded when I tried again second time.
I monitored the drive for 2-3 hours this morning by frequently loading the partition editor, but it appeared in the editor without fail.
Is a HDD failure imminent?
Regards.