International Business Machines Corporation

Lenovo (singapore) Pte. Ltd.

Yasuhiro Horiuchi

Masaharu Itoh

Arimasa Naitoh

Ken Sasaki

Hiroyuki Uchida

Kohsuke Ohtani

Kazunobu Umeda

Masaki Obinata

Tatsuo Ikegami

Masaki Ohshima

A computer implemented method resumes a computer from a power-saving state in a short time. Prior to shifting to a power-saving state, a drive sets a status flag indicating a loading state of a disk at a flash memory. For resumption from the power-saving state, the BIOS requests a ready notification from the drive. When it is determined that the status flag indicates not-loading of a disk, the drive skips the detection processing of the disk including initialization of a read/write circuit and a servo mechanism such as a spindle motor and sends a ready notification indicating not-loading of the disk to the BIOS. Receiving the ready notification, the BIOS can continue the resume processing.

Shortening resume time from a power-saving state

Methods and apparatus are provided for inhibiting data writing to an optical disc drive connected to a computer. A BIOS confirms presence of a security function of an optical disc drive. When the optical disc drive possesses the security function, the BIOS delivers a command to the optical disc drive to set it to a read-only mode. The optical disc drive that has received the command sets the drive per se to operate in the read-only mode. Since a command for setting it to the read-only mode and a command for releasing it are delivered to the optical disc drive only by the BIOS, when a control is transferred to an Operating System (OS), setting of the read-only mode cannot be released by the OS and other OS's, or application software.

Apparatus and methods for setting security to storage unit and computer

A disk drive includes an information processorfor reading out or writing information from or to the disk drive, a disk drive unitfor driving a disk, an access unitfor reading out or writing information from or to the disk, and a controllerfor controlling the disk drive unit, and a disk controller. The disk drive is driven at a set drive speed. Format identification information is acquired from information recorded on the disk, and drive-speed information for the disk drive, determined from the acquired format identification information, is transmitted to control the speed of the disk.

Variable speed disk drive and method of controlling the disk drive from recorded drive-speed format information

Internal CD-ROM drive for a personal computer

Growing community of inventors

Yamato, Japan

Yasuhiro Horiuchi