acpi woes and dead filesystem

[Steve Franks]

So, I got my desktop system (read: personal cpu, not a server) all set
up, been using it for a couple weeks, all is happy.

Now, I'm a bit of a tree-hugger, see, so I tend to like to suspend my
computers insted of leaving them on perpetually.

As such, tried acpiconf -s3 initially (others say unsupported).
Seemed to go down ok, but coming back up it reboots every time. Ho
hum.  So I follow the handbook and go apm -Z, but that barely saves
any power (can still hear disk, fan, etc, although screen blanks (apm
-z also casues a reboot)

Reanabled acpi -s3, lo, it appears to work, except, first time, only X
comes back (not vtty's).  Second time X doesn't come back either.  Try
ctl-alt-del, try suspend button, etc, no choice but to power down.

I should mention at this point, that being paranoid, I habitually set
all my fstab's to rw,sync, not just rw, which makes my next finding
somewhat suprising to me:

Upon power up, I am informed my filesystem is toast, and all I get is a shell.

My question: besides searching for sympathy, does anyone know how to
truly protect a system against unplanned powerdown and/or crash during
disk acess?  Not to compare apples and oranges, but I've been shutting
down my windows systems by the 'pull the plug' method for years now,
and I've never had a corrupted filesystem.  I supose this could be
because windows is just sloppy and doesn't care if ntfs is trashed, as
long as the ntldr, etc, is not in the trashed location.

Short of never suspending my system, I'd like a nicer way of
preventing this.  Course it appears I can't trully suspend my system
more than once anyway, so perhaps it's moot.

Steve