Cool Things :: Notebook battery as UPS
Maybe its a lot easier than you think:
on my gericom notebook there is a special option in the bios which does the following:
it halts the system and copies everything from the ram in a special partiton on hd. So you can reboot your system at the state were you shut it off.
If your bios does not support it, maybe a bios update will help.
BTW: your harddisk will not crash if you only switch off power. the power supply in a "normal" desktop or notebook system does exactly the same. Only a few systems support a "nice" switch off using special electrical circuits.
Breadman
www.bread-n-linux.de.vu
Funny you should say that, my laptop is a Dell and everytime it boot it complains there's no "suspend to disk partition". I don't think it's used the way your is but it's similar.
I know it won't crash if I pull the plug but I wolld jsut like it to shut down gracefully. I formatted the drives using Ext3 so it checks the drive for me automatically after an improper shutdown but since it's a laptop I just wanted to avoid that if possible.
A improper shutdown is nothing which might damage the hardware.
Your problem is rather the software: When your system is running it has to create certain temporary data.
If you boot it after it crashed it checks itself. Then the error message (or whatever) appears.
This check procedure is nothing bad, it only checks whether your drive is physically damaged and it deletes old temporary data.
Much more dangerous than an improper shutdown is the switching on of the harddisk.
I have got a 2.5' HDD in an external disc case which i run via USB. After booting it needs about some houndred mV. if i switch it on it can be a dozen times of it.
What I want to say by that is: for your drive it is no problem if it is abruptly cut off energy. It can also stand high (to certain extend) energy impulses.
if you have not a script for power-shut-off included in your bios you surely will have to create a script for your current os.
Since I am a linux-noop i cannot help you with that. Sorry!
Breadman
www.bread-n-linux.de.vu
Gotta remember: don't use a swap file on a CF!
Flash memory has limited number of writes per sector before it dies. Without a swap, that sort of setup can practically run forever.
original here.