Hi,

It seems there is a spare partition which we could use.

This leaves the problem of mounting rw a partition and yanking the power.

Hasn't the new kernel support for a journaling file system? If we make a "settings" partition, this could be a journaling FS, and it doesn't matter if we yank the power.

The spinning up/down problem could probably be fixed in the kernel, as mlord knows both kernel and IDE pretty well.

Just a quick thought ....