Here are simple to follow steps on how to disable and set timer for head parking with WD EARS drive. To do this task we are going to use wdiddle3 utility developed by Wester Digital. According to the Western Digital the wdiddle3 utility was not designed to be used with EARS drives so no warranty ! In particula my own drive did not take it well when i completelly disabled parking idle timer as I could hear strange clicking sound almost every second.
The utility runs only from a DOS so we need to use freedos.
- get freedos iso ( fdfullcd.iso (153MB) ) and burn it to cd-rw ( 153MB ) with multi-session
- get wdidle3 utility: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=609&sid=113
- there are suggestions to burn freedos and wdidle3 on the same cd using multi-session but that did not work for me from some reason. What i did was that I had 2 cd-rw cd’s . One with freedos bootable and second with wdidle3 on it.
- reboot with freedos cd
- I had some problems with cdrom the only thing that worked was to after boot hit ENTER and then choose 1 ” install to hard… ” Select language to ENG and then Run free dos from CDROM
- then you get to the prompt with X: which is your cdrom. Swap disc’s now. list files with dir command to make sure that wdidle3.exe is in your current directory and then enter:
X:>wdidle3 /D
to this will disable
Idle3 Timer is Disabled
or
X:>wdidle3 /S255
to set timer to 4.5 min where you can choose number from 1 to 255 mil sec