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I’ve got a plethora of external hard disks attached to my MacBook Pro. One for my personal media files and Time Machine and another two for video editing. At some point the drives go into sleep mode which proves an aggravation in Final Cut Pro because they need to spin up after their slumber.

The Energy Saver preference pane has an option to “Put hard disks to sleep whenever possible” which I unchecked. The drives no longer spin down but this means constant whirring of motors and fans when the MBP is doing nothing.

An ideal solution is using AppleScript to control hard disk sleep mode when using Final Cut. Although I haven’t found an existing script for this I did find two tools to modify the sleep timer.

A tip from MacRumors suggests using the command-line tool pmset to view and change the sleep timer.

MacOSXHints points to the Developer Tools and an application called SpindownHD which sets the timer via the Mac GUI. This works successfully although the “device scan” listing doesn’t show any drives in 10.5 (for me anyway).

Using this tip from MacOSXHints I’d like to create an AppleScript to modify the hard disk sleep timer via pmset or just automating SpindownHD. More on this in a later post.

For reasons unknown, my Mac’s user account spiraled out of control. A few moments after login the MacBook Pro’s fan kicked in, mouse pointer became erratic then unresponsive, and the spinning beach ball stayed for good. Only way out of this deadlock was a hard reboot.

I only had a few moments to launch Activity Monitor to discover the Spotlight service (mdworker, etc) was pegging the CPU. Unfortunately, nothing related to Spotlight resolved the problem. Here’s what got me working again…

This is a summary of what I did and not meant as a step-by-step solution. You’ll need a decent grasp on the UNIX command line for success.

• Login as root (enable it via Directory Utility from an admin account).
• Open Terminal and create a tarball of the home folder to a destination volume with enough space: tar cvf [dest] [home-folder]; this is critical because you need hidden files not always copied by Finder.
• Create a new user account.
• Delete the contents of that (new) home folder.
• In System Preferences / Accounts, delete the problematic user account; don’t delete the home folder in case you need it later (the old home folder is renamed with the suffix “(Deleted)”).
• Rename your new user account to that of the old one.
• Untar the tarball: tar xvf [tarball] [home-folder].
• Rename the new home folder to that of your old one: mv [new-home] [old-home].
• Edit the new user account and verify it’s pointing to the new home folder.
• Ensure the new user account is the owner and has RW permission to the new home folder; may require chown -R [new-user] [home-folder].

Result? A new, and working, user account with the same configuration and files as the old one. This solution has the benefit of retaining the identical user and home folder name to avoid issues with configuration files.

There are probably variations to this process but this worked for me. I should note this was performed under OS X 10.5.1. Be sure to disable the root account when you’re finished.