Will XP Bork my Grub?

grub only has an image installed in the mbr - stage1, and an appropriate stage 1_5 if you need support for a particular filesystem for your boot partition. stage2, and subsequently the menu options and stuff are all read from the boot partition. even if your mbr gets fscked by M$ (which it most certainly will), you can recover it as long as you still have that boot partition. (or directory, if you don't have a separate partition.)

here is what i would personally do:

1. set the windows destination partition to active. (this will make it appear to windows as drive c. you don't want windows to be accidentally put on drive g or something... at least, i hope you don't)

2. install xp.

3. when your windows is all set up nice and pretty, and you want to get back to a real os, boot into any linux install cd that has a command line. the gentoo livecd works nicely.

when you're there, set up grub just like you would for the first install: run 'grub' to get to the grub command line, set up the root, install into the mbr, and quit. reboot and it'll load up your old menu.lst (grub.conf) with your old menu options and settings. you don't have to change any of the active partitions afterward - linux can boot from any partition regardless of active state.

i assume it's not particularly difficult - probably not an entire weekend. but honestly i don't know; i've never bothered with suspend or hibernation or any of that for acpi. but i'll poke around and see what i can dig up for you....

... i didn't bother pressing submit, because i dug up some stuff in a couple of minutes.

the sleep state you want to work is S3, right? suspend to ram?

it doesn't work with linux acpi. it's not supported with 2.4.x kernels.

(see these documents:
http://xtrinsic.com/geek/articles/acpi.phtml
http://lists.debian.org/debian-lapto.../msg00418.html
)

oh wait... i saw in an old post of yours that you knew that already. oops.

you could, however, do S4 - suspend to disk, or hibernation. that gets to be a pain, though, because you have to make a separate hibernation partition on your hard drive, and it's slow because it has to write all running processes to disk, etc.

do you want to do that? not only would you have to resize partitions, you'd have to get the swsusp kernel patch from http://fchabaud.free.fr/English/defa...sp&FILE3=Index as well as a script such as the one on this page: http://cpbotha.net/clevo5600/clevo5600_linux/

and, like the swsusp author says at the top of his page, use at your own risk.

plus, if you want to patch anything other than the vanilla kernel, you have a chance of getting rejected hunks - which means you'd be editing kernel source by hand. but by using a vanilla kernel you're sacrificing all those other cool patches.

if you want to do it, by all means - it's your computer. i'll help you with what i know along the way if you want, but if something weird happens... well... don't say i didn't warn you.

kernel 2.5 has (will have) suspend to ram as well as hibernate to system swap instead of a separate partition. it's not worth the stability tradeoff, though - you should wait for 2.6 instead of 2.5.

no, the backlight won't turn off. the best i can get at the moment is a black screen, which is better than nothing.

... want to volunteer to write a kernel module?

actually, i'm teaching myself c now. i want to write a module that takes advantage of sager specific stuff - turning the backlight off, that stupid little email light, etc. like the toshiba laptops have.

... but that's definitely a long way off - not only do i have to finish learning c, i have to learn all about the workings of the kernel. hopefully someone else will do it before me.