Suse 10: cannot reboot into Windows after suspend-to-disk
 

Hi,

I am using a dual boot system of Suse 10 and Windows xp. In Suse 10, I cannot reboot into windows after suspend-to-disk. In Suse 9.3, although rebooting into another os or kernel after suspend-to-disk was not allowed by default, it could be enabled by specifying POWERSAVE_BOOT_LOADER="OTHER" in the file /etc/sysconfig/powersave/common.

In Suse 10, this parameter seems to have been renamed as BOOT_LOADER, but setting it to "OTHER" does not work, i.e., it does not give me a grub menu from which I can choose windows. However, the comment on that parameter is the same as 9.3, so I suppose it should work as before.

How could I get this working?

Thanks.

In my rather limited Linux experience i have know XP and Linux to co-exist on the same partition.

My dual boot system is already working fine with separate partitions for Suse and WinXP, so the partitioning might not be an issue. Here is a brief description on suspend-to-disk from the homepage of the swsusp project.

"Software Suspend is most easily described as the Linux equivalent of Windows' hibernate functionality. It saves the contents of memory to disk and powers down. When the computer is started up again, it reloads the contents and the user can continue from where they left off. No documents need to be reloaded or applications reopened and the process is much faster than a normal shutdown and start up."


With software suspend combined with Windows' hibernate feature, you can quickly switch from linux to windows, and vice versa. Or you can simply store the current memory state to hard drive to save power, and resume to your work later. In Suse KDE, this feature is accessible by using KPowersave, a GUI wrapper around the software suspend utility.

This feature is somewhat risky because the current memory contents are saved into swap. For example, if you have two linux kernels on your system, suspending one and rebooting into the other will damage your system. For Linux and Windows, this is not a problem because either of them has its own swap space.

Nevertheless, from Suse 9.3 on, a security measure has been added by automatically disabling the grub menu after suspend-to-disk and forcing you to resume to the operating system you suspended from. As mentioned in my first post, in 9.3 this could be re-enabled by editing the appropriate system file. But the same technique does not work for me in Suse 10.