Re: Suspend To Disk
On Sat, 23 Sep 2000, Erik van der Meulen <e.van.der.meulen@avondel.nl>
wrote:
> Dear Group, I use a Dell Latitude CPi 366 with Debian 2.2 and
> Helix-Gnome. I would like to set up a 'suspend to disk' feature but do
> not know where to start. In fact, I don't even know if it can be done
> at all. So any pointers mucht appreciated!
Right. The place to look is, sadly, toward the Windows software and the
laptop documentation that shipped with the hardware.
Suspend to Disk is a feature of the APM BIOS[1] that uses a preallocated
file or disk partition to store the system state while you sleep.
You should read the original manuals, which should tell you how to get
this feature set up for Windows 95 and friends. Follow those
instructions, but prefer a partition for the suspend to disk space,
rather than a file.
Assuming that you can get the feature working in Windows, you can /try/
to use it with Linux. It has a better than even chance of simply not
working, in my experience, though.
Once it's started, boot into Linux and make *sure* that there isn't any
important data that could be corrupted by a hard-lock of the system
available.
Make a full backup of anything that you can't replace easily. I know
that this is a typical instruction, and that it's often ignored.
DON'T IGNORE THIS! PLEASE! I BEG YOU!
I have had one laptop trash one of my partitions fairly thoroughly while
trying to suspend to disk. You run the same risk testing this under
Linux. It's a small chance, but an existent one.
I typically boot into Linux with the command line parameter
'init=/bin/bash' for this testing.
Once you are at a safe system state and ready to risk hanging the box,
hit the hotkey or button that suspends the system under Windows. This
should do some stuff, and suspend the system to disk.
This may well not work, in my experience, which is a pain. If it
doesn't, it may well hang the box or something equally obnoxious. If so,
simply disable the feature in the BIOS and sigh a little. You can't
suspend to disk with your laptop.
If it /does/ work, power on the laptop again. It should go through the
BIOS boot testing and then restore the system state. If you get back to
where you were, you have working suspend to disk. Congratulations.
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] Possibly also ACPI, but Linux does not support that part of ACPI at
the moment, to the best of my knowledge.
--
It's a truism in technological development that
no silver lining comes without its cloud.
-- Bruce Sterling
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