Catatonic hard drive

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

So I was sitting by my SuSE 9.0 server today checking my mail, and every few 
minutes or so I kept hearing that sound of the hard drive spinning up.

There are two possibilities, as I see it.  Either my hard drive is about to 
go, or it's configured to sleep when it shouldn't (being a server that's on 
24/7).  Of course we all know that the more painful option is likely to be 
the correct one, so I'm off to by a hard drive while my system is backing up 
to my external USB drive.

- Am I missing any possibilities?

- How does one tell the hard drive not to sleep, in case it's that?  Is it 
an APM/ACPI thing?

- To minimize downtime, I would like to install SuSE 9.2 and all my other 
software on the new hard drive in a second computer,  and move it over and 
tweak when it's ready.  The main obstacles I see to doing this is moving 
from apache1.3 to apache2 (ther emust be a migration FAQ somewhere, though), 
and the differing hardware, especially the video card.  Has anyone else done 
this?  How did it go?