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Date:      Wed, 4 Jul 2001 21:05:28 -0700
From:      Ben Lovett <blovett@bsdguru.com>
To:        mobile@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Dell Inspiron 8000 and suspend-to-disk
Message-ID:  <20010704210528.A691@bsdguru.com>
In-Reply-To: <3B4353BE.927522EF@ufl.edu>; from bobj@ufl.edu on Wed, Jul 04, 2001 at 01:34:54PM -0400
References:  <20010703101035.A1027@bsdguru.com> <3B433888.7020304@quack.kfu.com> <3B4353BE.927522EF@ufl.edu>

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I believe I saw Bob Johnson (bobj@ufl.edu) write this:
> Nick Sayer wrote:
> > 
> > Ben Lovett wrote:
> > 
> > >
> > >I've already created the space needed for the partition (around 250MB),
> > >by running fips on the fat32 partition.  But, I would like to know what
> > >application I need to get that new partition "ready" for suspend to
> > >disk.. Or do I just need to assign it a certain partition id?
> > >
> > 
> > Leave the space unpartitioned and run 'phdisk /create /partition' after
> > booting your windows partition to DOS.
> > 
> 
> If you were starting from scratch, I'd recommend setting up the phdisk 
> partition before you install FreeBSD, so it can use whatever phdisk 
> leaves behind.  An alternative is to leave more than it needs as unused 
> disk space, then run phdisk, then use Partition Magic or fips to reclaim 
> the leftover unused space.  
> 
> I don't think your phdisk partition will need to be twice the size of your 
> memory (I think you mentioned that in a previous posting).  I think it 
> only needs to be the size of your ram plus a few megabytes of overhead.  
> E.G. on my system I have 196 MB of RAM, my phdisk partition is 206 MB.
> 
> > ** WARNING **
> > 
> > On my old Insperon 3500, when the suspend-to-disk partition was placed
> > beyond 2G, bits of the disk would be trashed on suspend-to-disk! Maybe
> > they've fixed this, maybe they haven't. :-) Since Dells generally don't
> > come with a suspend-to-disk partition (they use a suspend file instead,
> > but that only works under DOS), it's probably unsupported to use the
> > partition (the option is there because they got it from Phoenix, their
> > BIOS supplier).
> > 
> 
> I've been using a suspend-to-disk partition for about a year in my 
> Inspiron 7500, and haven't had any problems.  It's suspend-to-ram that 
> is unreliable (in Windows and in FreeBSD, and it seems to work better 
> in FreeBSD).  Suspend-to-disk mostly works fine with Windows 98 also, 
> except that it is likely to get confused if it wakes up with a different 
> hardware configuration than it went to sleep with.
> 
> A vague description of how I set up my system is at 
> http://www.afn.org/~afn01750/inspiron.html
> It might provide you with some useful clues. 
> 

Well.. I followed the directions that Nick Sayer described (phdisk
/create /partition), and the Dell BIOS still fails to find the s2d
partition :(  I'm thinking of contacting Dell regarding this issue, but
that will have to wait until I find out if my disk is infact dying..  I
hope not, as I have only had this system for 3 weeks!!

As to another question that I have that is totally unrelated to
suspending to disk..  When I suspend my system, everything works fine
and dandy.  But, when I go to close the display, as soon as it latches,
the system seems to resume, then suspend again, effectively giving power
to the HD, and then killing it almost immediatly.  I believe this is the
reason behind some strange noises that I hear comming from my disk every
once in a while.  It sounds like one of the heads is moving rather
abruptly, or something like that.  Has anyone else noticed similar
behaviour on Dell i8k's built as of late?

Thanks!

-ben

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