reformatting laptop & ACPI: special partitions?

[Tobias Roth]

On Mon, May 10, 2004 at 03:35:54PM -0700, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> 
> Many laptops have a suspend to disk capability built into BIOS and
> FreeBSD can use this. IT requires the creation of a special partition
> (slice) which is normally done using a utility from the computer
> maker. I can't say whether Sony has one. Even if it does, it must be
> near the beginning of the hard drive (can't remember just how close). I
> could not create one on my laptop because the NTFS partition with XP was
> too big. :-(

a small addition. it is also possible to suspend with a hibernation file
instead of a slice. this file has to reside on the first DOS slice and
usually is created with the same vendor-specific tool as the partition is.
since i need windows around for the occasional firmware upgrades of my
thinkpad, that's what works best for me. of course you need to convert
your windows NTFS slice to FAT32, but who cares...

note that the above is meant to work with bios hibernation. the OS
hibernation (eg what XP does) also works with a hibernation file but this
is not the same. also note that up to now i only tried this with APM.

cheers, t.