# Need equivalent to WDIDLE3



## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

Ok, I don't have an immediate need for this but I can see where this would be a big help to the Community. The newest Western Digital drives require that the IntelliPark feature be disabled but, so far, the only way to do this is by booting a DOS disk of WDIDLE3. That requires cracking open adesktop PC case and hooking up to an internal SATA connector. Given that we have long had the capability to use MFSTools, WINMFS, and JMFS with a USB to SATA adapter cable, why can't we get one of our best and brightest in this Community to write a version of WDIDLE3 that will allow the same capability? Thanks in advance.


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## unitron (Apr 28, 2006)

lillevig said:


> Ok, I don't have an immediate need for this but I can see where this would be a big help to the Community. The newest Western Digital drives require that the IntelliPark feature be disabled but, so far, the only way to do this is by booting a DOS disk of WDIDLE3. That requires cracking open adesktop PC case and hooking up to an internal SATA connector. Given that we have long had the capability to use MFSTools, WINMFS, and JMFS with a USB to SATA adapter cable, why can't we get one of our best and brightest in this Community to write a version of WDIDLE3 that will allow the same capability? Thanks in advance.


I think the problem is that the USB adapter doesn't allow direct enough communications with the drive to allow re-writing its firmware, which is lower level than just writing partitions.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

unitron said:


> I think the problem is that the USB adapter doesn't allow direct enough communications with the drive to allow re-writing its firmware, which is lower level than just writing partitions.


I don't think that's the case because the USB adapter is really just translating one serial format to another. The SATA interface is just a serial interface of a slightly different format with no direct command lines to the internal workings. I would think that if the command strings were known for setting the internal functions like TLER and AAM, then it would be a simple task to send them from some other software program (like JMFS) or maybe even manually from Linux.


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## lillevig (Dec 7, 2010)

Found this site when I was hunting around. Looks like he provides not only the utility but the Linux source code as well. Unfortunately, I'm not a Linux guy. Maybe if I also post this on the JMFS thread someone can incorporate it.

http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/


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## Soapm (May 9, 2007)

lillevig said:


> Found this site when I was hunting around. Looks like he provides not only the utility but the Linux source code as well. Unfortunately, I'm not a Linux guy. Maybe if I also post this on the JMFS thread someone can incorporate it.
> 
> http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/


Great find!!!


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