Re: tlug: Sony VAIO & apm

[David Dibben <dibben@example.com>]

Thanks for the info on PHDISK.EXE, I had assumed that having wiped the
partitons on my VAIO 505EX when I installed linux that I had to live with not
having suspend to disk. I repartitioned my disk last night, ran PHDISK.EXE and
now the suspend to disk works fine. The hardest part was finding the recovery
disk, which seems to be a common problem!

There do seem to be some differences between the 505 and the 731 though.

On 12-Nov-98 Frank Bennett wrote:
>   (1) The PHDISK.EXE utility from the VAIO recovery CD can be
>       used to re-create a deleted hibernation-mode partition.
>       Without this partition, the power saving features of the
>       BIOS will behave strangely, so it shouldn't be deleted.

On my 505 without the partition the save to memory feature semed to behave
without any problems at all and the save to disk just didn't work. When the
save to disk key was pressed it saved to memory instead.

>   (3) The commands "apm -s" (or "apm --suspend") and "apm -S" (or
>       "apm --standby") should NEVER be used on a VAIO.  These
>       commands may be the cause of subsequent suspend or standby
>       mode failures; they should be treated (on a VAIO 731) as
>       EVIL.  Use the handy-dandy "processor snooze" and "disk
>       snooze" keys instead; they at least MAY be safe.

apm -s and apm -S don't seem to cause any problems but they both seem to cause a
save to memory even with the hibernation partiton.  The processor snooze and
disk snooze keys work correctly (now).

> I used the PHDISK.EXE utility from the recovery CD for the VAIO
> to create the requisite partition at the tail end of the disk.

I repartitioned my disk with a small 100MB dos partition left at the end,
rebooted from the recovery CD and ran "PHDISK.EXE /CREATE /PARTITION". It told
me that it was creating a new partition but gave no option to tell it where to
do it. 

Rebooting to linux and trying to do a save to disk cause the machine to lock
up. After rebooting a quick check with fdisk showed that PHDISK.EXE had created
the partition on top of the dos partition at the end of the disk. So I had two
partitions occupying the same space. After deleting the dos partition
everything works fine.

But, it seems that PHDISK.EXE decides what size partition it needs and creates
it at the end of the disk irrespective of what partitions are already there and
without asking.  So it looks like one needs to be careful when running it.  

David

----------------------------------
E-Mail: David Dibben <dibben@example.com>
Date: 13-Nov-98
Time: 09:32:10
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