[ltp] Looong wait before booting - T20

[Uwe.Nestmann at EPFL.ch]

>>>>> "HGP" == =?Windows-1252?Q?Hans-G=F6ran Puke?= <Windows-1252> writes:

HGP> I have a very annoying problem with my Thinkpad T20: It
HGP> waits (seemingly does nothing at all) a couple of
HGP> minutes, displaying the Thinkpad logo, before it starts
HGP> to boot the operating system.

Yes, I had the same problem at the time I played with
BIOS-based hibernation (suspend-to-disk) 
on my X22 (Debian "woody", dualboot with win2k).

HGP> Does anyone here have a clue about what can be wrong
HGP> with my setup?

I got the impression during my various attempts that the
"time-before-lilo" was proportional to the size of the
partition on which the BIOS-hibernation files resides.
Shaping this partition (notably a separate one next to the
win2k base partition) to be just a bit larger than the
required size (don't remember the exact formula) decreased
the time-before-lilo down to just a second or so.
(IIRC, I had to be careful not to boot into Win2k
immediately after creating the hibernation-file partition,
because win2k would immediately put loads of useless files
into it such that there would not be enough space left to
put a hibernation file.  I think I ultimately even moved the
a hibernation file that I created earlier to the target
partition using "mv" ;-)

Wild guess: maybe, the BIOS, in the case that there _exists_
a hibernation file for it on some FAT partition, takes a
long time to find out precisely _where_ it is if the
partition is (too) large.

(Note that when resuming from suspend-to-RAM, the response
was always immediate, independent of the above variations.)


One more odd thing: 
During all this playing with the size of the
hibernation-file partition, I must have "lost" the
medium-blue IBM-screen that was formerly displayed when
performing the hibernate operation.  Now, the system just
shows a black screen and I only know that hibernation has
terminated when the blinking moon led stops blinking and the
disk activity apparently turns quiet.  
Does anyone have a guess why this could be?


== Uwe ==