Filesystems, Disks and Memory

i have recently recieved a new hard drive which i needed for lack of space. i installed a newer version of my previous operating system, suse 8.2. i saved my old drive just in case. anyway this thing only boots sporadically. the person who gave it to me forgot to tell me there was problems with it. it works once in a while, if i leave the computer for a while with no disk activity, the system will freeze, the drive stops spinning. does anyone know of any programs i could run that will keep the disk busy? not filling up space, but just keep the platters spinning? this would be a temporary fix until i save the money to buy a new drive.

Would one of the distributed programs be of any use for this?

probably not because those only utilize spare cpu cycles. actually ive found something that works, the kde program "kdirstat" takes a long time to go through and stat every file on disk. so that actually keeps things spinning. i realize im just gonna have to deal with this until i get a new drive. thanks anyway!