29th of November 2004
Stuff...
Hibernation
A tip for anyone using suspend-to-disk or "hibernation" or whatever you prefer to call it: If the system reboots but doesn't pick up the hibernate file (ie it reboots as if you never even hibernated in the first place) then you should either:
1. Delete the hibernate file immediately to prevent the system from rebooting it, or,
2. Don't make any changes to the file-system what-so-ever.
If you should find yourself rebooting into the hibernate file (if you ignored point 1 above) then you should turn your system off. You will do less damage with a hard, unclean shutdown than you will by syncing all your drives.
I've been meaning to correct myself on this point for a while now. When I wrote this I thought it would make more sense to just perform a hard shut-down, but since then I have realised this is NOT the best course of action. If you reboot and the system doesn't pick up the hibernate file for whatever reason (for me it was because of an error in my APPEND= line passed to the kernel) then the best course of action is:
# swapoff /dev/swap
# mkswap /dev/swap
# swapon /dev/swap
* Where /dev/swap is the path to your swap partition, of course. But you knew that, right?
Why? Well because on bootup things get modified whether you like it or not. Things get "touch"ed, things get moved, things get deleted, things get created then removed a little later on. If your filesystem is already in a "dirty" state then this may cause some serious issues. I use reiserfs on my laptop and it does NOT like you modifying the filesystem when it's not cleanly unmounted. The problem is hibernating seems to mark the filesystem as cleanly unmounted. God knows why. They should mark it dirty in my opinion, just in case it doesn't resume properly.
Anyway, providing you delete the resume file from the swap partition you should be okay and get away without any trouble.
I got an email from Alex (my German flatmate in my second year) last night. Which was nice. Not heard from Him in ages. When I get out of Aberystwyth and enter the "real" world I plan on amassing a small sum of money and going to Germany and getting hammered on fine German beers. Er, I mean, going to Germany and sampling some of their fine ales. Yes.
I also got an email from a reader :-o Whatever next?
Today sees the first frost of the year. Well, the first frost of the year for me. It's bloody freezing outside, it's hat and gloves weather but that didn't occur to me until halfway to the Uni. I was too late to go to the lecture in which I had been planning on working on my major project, so I went to the Sun Lounge instead to do it. And here I am now, procrastinating away on my blog- D'oh!
Suppose I'd better get some work done.