hibernate to disk on ASUS laptop

[Erdi Balint <erdibalint@freemail.hu>]

Hi,

I am struggling to make hibernation work on my ASUS laptop 
(Unfortunately I do not know the exact model number, it was from the L 
series, I reckon).

I've decided to use the suspend-to-disk method and use the swap 
partition (/dev/hda3) for this end. I use stock kernel version 2.6.22.

The 'free' command shows the following:

(...)
Swap:          949          0        949

So apparently the swap partition is ok.

I've configured hibernate for the above described idea and launched 
'sudo hibernate -v3'

I see this on the console:

hibernate: Trying method in suspend2.conf...
hibernate: Trying method in disk.conf...
hibernate: Trying method in ususpend-disk.conf...
hibernate: Including configuration from common.conf

Then several more lines that basically indicate that everything works as 
expected, the swap is big enough to hold the image (Image size: 366340). 
My laptop powers off. Things go wrong when I switch it on, expecting to 
resume my hibernate session.

What it does instead is that it boots like hibernation had never 
happened at all without indicating what's wrong.

I copy a few lines of dmesg here that might be related to that problem:

Linux version 2.6.22-1-686 (Debian 2.6.22-3)
Kernel command line: root=/dev/hda1 ro resume=/dev/hda3
(...)
checking if image is initramfs... it is
Freeing initrd memory: 1292k freed
(...)
Unable to find swap-space signature

It also says sometimes:

swapon: /dev/hda3: Invalid argument. failed,

but this line is mysteriously missing from dmesg, I could see it quickly 
scroll away but could never review it later (using dmesg or syslog)

When this happens, I do:

sudo mkswap /dev/hda3;
sudo swapon -a

so swap is restored and then try hibernating again, but that does not 
help either.

In the hibernate.log, I could not spot anything wrong either:

Starting suspend at Sun Aug 26 18:57:19 CEST 2007
hibernate: [01] Executing CheckLastResume ...
Resumed at Sun Aug 26 18:57:19 CEST 2007
(...)
Starting suspend at Sun Aug 26 18:58:19 CEST 2007
(...)
Unloading blacklisted modules listed /etc/hibernate/blacklisted-modules
(...)
hibernate: [99] Executing DoUSuspend ...
hibernate: Running /usr/sbin/s2disk ...

I tried to nudge things by manually editing the grub menu.lst and adding 
the resume kernel boot parameter:

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-1-686 root=/dev/hda1 ro 
resume=/dev/hda3

And also by adding one line in /etc/hibernate/suspend2.conf to define 
the SuspendDevice manually:

SuspendDevice swap:/dev/hda3

, but that did not help either.

I use acpi, also checked the BIOS parameters and browsed through several 
forums but could not find an answer to this problem. I have an ATI 
Radeon card that I've read on several occasions could cause problems but 
I am not yet there to have this kind of annoyances, I think :)

Did any of you had serious experiences or any luck making this work on 
an ASUS laptop? (As a secondary question, I would be happy to know why 
certain lines that I see on the console when my laptop boots are 
inaccessible later? Neither by dmesg, nor in syslog, see the example of 
'swapon: /dev/hda3: Invalid argument. failed' above.)

Any help is much appreciated, thank you,
Balint