For the first time ever, I was able to successfully suspend my laptop (IBM T40p) to RAM. For the longest time I was having a problem where the disk would go completely insane upon resuming. Very annoying.
I found out recently that it was probably due to the BIOS re-enabling HPA (Host Protected Area) when coming out of sleep. Unfortunately, there didn’t appear to be any kind of workaround for it, but tonight I discovered that you can use the Hitachi Feature Tool to disable it for good. It totally fixed my problem. Woo.
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Interesting, this might be the key to make STR work on my Acer as well! I’m going to try this out when I get the chance. Thanks for the great hint!
Unless Matthew Garrett continues to suck, there should be a fix for this in Ubuntu (and hopefully recent upstream kernels at some point). I had this problem and it was at last years Debconf that he ran down the street demanding my laptop, disabled HPA in the BIOS, and we watched it resume correctly.
Just hit delete when you turn it on to get into the BIOS, it’s in there somewhere. The bug is that Linux disables it when it boots, but on resume the BIOS re-enables it, so Linux has to disable it on boot and resume.
Ross: I have it disabled in the BIOS already….but it was coming back on resume anyway (!)
Is there a patch to Linux to disable HPA on resume? My Sony Vaio has this bug — the only difference is, the BIOS is pretty basic and has about two options, none of which are relevant. The HDD just doesn’t work after a resume and things rapidly lock up. The drive is:
hda: TOSHIBA MK6006GAH, ATA DISK drive
James: interesting, my T40p won’t enable it on resume if its disabled in the BIOS. Maybe different BIOS versions?