In message , Ant
writes:
On 1/17/2016 1:05 AM, Rod Speed wrote:
[]
Nope, you've mangled that utterly. There was
no need to do that with 3.5" floppy drives.

No, I meant parking HDDs with 3.5" bootable floppy disks with their
park software.

I don't remember ever coming across _bootable_ park commands; I remember
ones that could be copied to the HD itself, and called from DOS.
[]
It was possible to park the heads with the early
hard drives that didn’t do anything special
when powered down and saw the heads land
on the platters when they stopped rotating.

Then, why did IBM say to manually park when moving my IBM PS/2 model 30
286 desktop machine?

To move the head into a normally not used part of the disc, so any
damage [to the disc] caused by "landing" didn't matter (which according
to posts in this thread may have also been textured to reduce stiction).
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

After a typical day at the BBC you want something to take your mind off work,
although in the end, decent people being eaten alive by heartless monsters
running amok proved no distraction. - Eddie Mair, RT 2015/7/4-10