acpi woes and dead filesystem

[Chuck Swiger]

On Dec 8, 2006, at 1:21 PM, Steve Franks wrote:
> 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.

You might try turning them off entirely...?

> 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)

Try updating your BIOS.  Try to verify that all of the hardware you  
have installed actually supports going into power-saving mode-- I was  
surprised to discover that, for instance, some USB devices will  
prevent the system from entering S3 power-save mode.

You might also try tweaking the BIOS settings, and see whether you  
can get S1 mode working first, before trying to get the deeper S3  
mode going.

> 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.

Did running "fsck" by hand fix it?

Note that you really ought to mention some basic details, such as  
which version of FreeBSD you are running, and what your hardware is...

> My question: besides searching for sympathy, does anyone know how to
> truly protect a system against unplanned powerdown and/or crash during
> disk acess?

By using an external UPS, or a high quality RAID system which  
includes an internal battery to ensure the disk cache gets flushed....

-- 
-Chuck