which only recently started happening.

That is, I first installed Fedora11 on this laptop about two months ago. For the first month, Suspend usually worked. That is, I could left-click on the battery icon (annunciator) select 'Suspend', the screen would go dark just as expected. And then coming back to they system pressing the shift key would bring it out of suspend, ask for hte password prompt, and once the password was entered, I was back where I was, running all the same applications.

But within the last two weeks, something changed. Now I notice disk activity when starting Suspend (I never noticed this before), and 3 out of 4 times, when I come back to the computer, I need to do a cold start; it is no longer in suspend. All the lights are out, even though the battery is still nearly fully charged.

Even stranger, sometimes (when the above happens), I cannot even start the computer with the power switch: I have to unplug the power, remove the battery, replace the battery and THEN press the power switch.

I haven't yet figured out any pattern (i.e. dependency what I was doing before suspend, which applications running) other than what I mentioned above: it happens about 3 out of 4 times now.

As I mentioned, I am running Fedora11, which I keep updated. The gnome-power-manager is version 2.6.4.

uname --all returns:

Linux Fedora11ToshibaM105 2.6.30.9-96.fc11.i686.PAE #1 SMP Tue Nov 3 23:41:33 EST 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

I have the power manager configured as follows:

On AC power: never, blank, never 100%
On Battery: 51', suspend, do nothing, 5 min
General: shutdown, suspend, only display icon when battery is present, use sound to notify in event of an error.

Disk activity sounds like it's trying to hibernate... there are issues if you use hibernation and disk encryption but I haven't had/heard of any with suspend

this is very normal for fedora the hibernate / Suspend dose not work on ALL hardware

if it is not working on yours then ...
it won't
I would disable it .

I understand that it is par for the course that it not work on all hardware. What is surprising, though, is that Supsend used to work pretty well, and now does not (I never tried Hibernate).

So one guess is that some recent upgrade broke the code. Another is that one of the hardware sensor the code relies on is beginning to fail, so that gnome-power-management thinks it is supposed to shutdown.

So is there any way I can test these guesses? Is there hardware diagnostic code I can run?

SystemRescueCD used to include a hardware diagnostic program, but so much re-arrangement took place in the most recent release, I am not sure if it even still has it. Nor do I remember it testing power management hardware sensors (this does not sound easy).

Or is there a known bug against Fedora 11 or gnome-power-manager for my hardware? I would do this search myself, but I am having a hard time thinking how to formulate the query. The bug titles for Red Hat in Mozilla are just not very promising.

The hardware is: Toshiba Satellite M105-S3064.

For that matter, has anyone else experience this general problem, that it was working, but a recent upgrade broke it?

I dread the prospect of disabling Suspend entirely, since even if it works only 1 out of 4 times, that is better than 0 out of 4.

i would suspect one of the updates is at fault . it happens a update breaks something

also it is a known bug/issue with a bunch of distros but it seams more so with fedora - with most of the problems