Shutdown / Poweroff does not spin down harddisk

[Christoph Lorenz]

When shutting down, my harddisk is not properly powered off before or spun down, so that it gives a sqeeking sound, when the shutdown process actually powers down the machine.

Additionally, the smartmontools show me an increasing Power-Off_Rectract_count (currently: 27).

The harddisk is the second drive in my machine, mounted at /mnt/sdb1, where from that directory, /tmp, /home, /var/lib/munin, /var/cache/munin and /var/lib/mythtv, are mounted by bindmounts.

I've already tried to patch /etc/init.d/halt by adding the following lines:

 hdparm -f /dev/sdb
 sleep 5
 hdparm -y /dev/sdb
 sleep 5
 log_action_msg "/dev/sdb spun down"

but that only leads to the fact, that the disk indeed spins down during the shutdown process, but at the very end, spins up again, just before the power supply switches off.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: upstart 1.12.1-0ubuntu4.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-40.69-lowlatency 3.13.11.10
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-40-lowlatency x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.6
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Tue Dec 9 20:47:41 2014
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-04-29 (224 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140417)
ProcKernelCmdline: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-40-lowlatency root=UUID=60553440-07a6-456c-8441-a6ae022e9f5e ro quiet splash
SourcePackage: upstart
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
UpstartBugCategory: System
UpstartRunningSessionVersion: init (upstart 1.12.1)
UpstartRunningSystemVersion: init (upstart 1.12.1)
modified.conffile..etc.default.cups: [modified]
modified.conffile..etc.munin.plugin.conf.d.munin.node: [deleted]
mtime.conffile..etc.default.cups: 2014-04-17T03:25:57