prevent operation on unmounted usb disk

[Marco Mandl]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:07:04 -0500, John Dangler wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 12:07 +0100, Marco Mandl wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> I use an usb disk for automated backup every night. The rest of the day
>> this disk is not used and unmounted.
>> 
>> Every few minutes ubuntu does something on this unmounted usb disk for
>> about ten seconds. I want to prevent this because it make a lot of noise.
> I assume that this is a usb connected external drive and not a _usb
> stick_  are you sure its every few minutes?  not maybe every hour?
> I know that there is a cron.hourly script which runs and does update
> something on the hard drive(s)

My cron.hourly is empty. What could a job do if the disk is unmounted.
>> 
>> Also I would like to stop this disk while it is not used. Is this
>> possible? How?
> err - unplug it ?

That can't be done by the automated backup process.
> 
> if the disk is mounted at boot time, try turning it off, and then
> mounting it as part of the script which runs your nightly backup, then
> unmount it again.

Why should I turn it off? I just unmount it. It is only temporarily
mounted by the backup job.

/m