sleep mode and suspend to disk on VAIO PCG-550FX

[Andy Sparrow]

> I had phdisk.exe format a special partition for that, but how
> does one trigger a suspend? Fn keystrokes just say 'beep' and
> nothing else ;)

Don't know how similar this might be to the 505, hopefully there's at 
least some parallels...

On my HP Omnibook, this beeping is simply an indicator that the key was 
noted by the BIOS.

If the BIOS doesn't consider the partition "right", it simply won't 
perform the suspend-to-disk, although on the OB at least, with some 
(later) BIOS versions it will suspend-to-RAM instead at this point (the 
original BIOS simply didn't do anything other than beep if the partition 
wasn't right).

Simply creating a partition of the correct size (RAM + video RAM, 
rounded up to whole cylinders, IIRC) & type (0x160 for me) in the same 
location the recovery CD would put it in (slice 1) doesn't seem to work, 
and even a cobbled-up 'phformat' (hacked to compile on -STABLE) doesn't 
seem to convince it to work. I suspect there's some other voodoo 
necessary...

In fact, the only method I've found that works for me is to initialize 
the disk (including a suspend partition of the appropriate size) from 
the recovery CD, drop out of the install when it starts to install Doze, 
boot the installer and delete the 'Doze partition from sysinstall and go 
on to install FreeBSD from there.

Both my old 5700 and my present 6000 were identical in this respect.

Then suspend-to-disk works perfectly modulo certain devices on the 6000 
- sound and trackpoint, IIRC - never getting re-attached after a 
resume-from-disk; they behave like they're no longer there...

However, this is still much better than needing to fsck after the 
battery runs down - possibly whilst suspended-to-RAM in your backpack. A 
BIOS-controlled auto-suspend to disk and power-off on battery exhaustion 
followed by a reboot when back on A/C works pretty well.

HTH.

Cheers,

AS